Neglected Fundamentals of Prize Law

Abstract

Law While a prolonged period of peace has multitudinous advantages, it has nevertheless one little defect. It obliterates all knowledge of prize law, and especially all knowledge of prize procedure. It is nbt credible that any lawyer or any merchant who had lived through the Napoleonic period would have accepted such a list of contraband as seems now to be considered normal; or would have seen nothing strange in the suggestion that contraband was whatever a belligerent saw fit to declare such. Nor would the men who had heard Sir William Scott proclaim that the principles of blockade were not to be subverted because in some particular case they would detract from a blockade's efficiency, 1 feel apprehensive that they would be subverted because of the introduction of railways. The neutral merchant who heard of the Imina Baumann2 knew that the sovereign rights of the neutral port were superior to the momentary exigencies of the hardestpressed belligerent state. But Peace comes, and we forget. Sixty years after the Imina Baumann' Chief Justice Chase .unlocked the floodgates of belligerent pretensions, and did away with the security of the neutral port. Not on any calculated desire to restore the balance disturbed by railways, be it noted, for railways were scarcely in question, but simply on grounds of belligerent advantage. A hundred years after the French admiral Allemand stayed his destructive hand when he met neutral American and Swedish merchantmen, the neutral flag was sent to the bottom in the East by the Russian and in the West by the German. We very easily forget. And it is very easy to forget procedure. It is the peculiar preserve of a few-a very few-lawyers and court officials, mostly of advanced years. Sailors and officers may know something of it, but the public knows nothing and cares less. By the time of the next war a new generation of lawyers has arisen, whose knowledge and, interest is precisely that of the public. Textbooks deal mainly with substantive law. Procedure has to be disinterred from musty books. And very 'The Ocean (iS8oi) 3 C. Rob. 297; The Luna (i8Io) Edw. Adm. i9o; ,The Stert (i8ox) 4 C. Rob. 65. 23 C. Rob. 167. t This case is usually, and apparently improperly, cited as The Imina. The master's name was Vroom (see Contents of 3 C. Rob.), and Baumann was seemingly part of the ship's name. This kind of mistake is often made; thus Rothery, Prize Droits, followed by Evans, P, in The Roumanian, speaks of "The Berlin .Tohannes"-really The Berlin, Johannes Poort, master.

Violations of Maritime Law by The Allied Powers During The World War

“…When he brought her in, his government assumed the risk for her detention in case it failed to prove the goods were contraband. 67 Soon after the outbreak of the war in 1914, the Allies began taking neutral vessels into port and detaining them while a case was " got up " against them with the aid of expansive contraband lists, rummaging of their cargoes, and by the use of all sorts of extraneous evidence. In the first protest of Secretary Bryan in December, 1914, while admitting the British right to visit and search merchant vessels at sea, he said, "this government cannot without protest permit American ships or cargoes to be taken into British ports and there detained for the purpose of searching generally for evidence of contraband, or upon presumptions created by special municipal enactments which are clearly at variance with international law and practice."…”