Terrorism and piracy: A legal view

Abstract

Terrorist attacks on persons or property on the high seas or in the newly designated “exclusive economic zones” bear analogy closer to the traditional international law of “piracy” than most observers suspect. In traditional practice “private ends” in the usual sense was not an essential element of the offense; the label and its legal results were attached to unrecognized belligerents too. The latest codifications of the international law relating to piracy, principally those deriving from the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas, are patently defective. A new formulation is proposed, with a commentary that, among other things, points out how international criminal law and universal jurisdiction can be coordinated with the generally accepted international law of armed conflict to clarify what is currently a chaotic legal situation.     

On the origins of a fermier général: Family strategies over seven generations (late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries)

Family archives from the French ancien régime period offer the possibility of analyzing complex family strategy in the long term. The present article deals with the Brac family over seven generations, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, as it rose in prominence from a start in leatherworking to eventual high office in regional and Parisian public life. Over the centuries, the family accumulated land (the patrimony); used a combination of marital, geographical, professional, and kinship networks to advance its various members; maintained a policy of economic parsimony in its expenditures; and through various procedures favored a single heir in each generation. Though the various lines of the family were geographically dispersed, their activities in the main continued to focus on the ancestral family lands and the local society of its origins.     

Court-Martial Jurisdiction and ex-Service Personnel: The ‘Boydell Gap’ (1948) Revisited

The ‘Boydell gap’ remedy in modern military law, which was prompted by a Divisional Court ruling in 1948, has been seen as authorizing the trial by court martial of those who, within the previous six months, had ceased to be subject to military law. The present paper argues, however, that Captain Boydell's case exposed primarily a territorial rather than a time-limitation obstacle to proceedings against ex-service personnel. Moreover, the case is historically significant in illuminating how the authorities wrestled with the problem of instituting criminal proceedings against military offenders such as black marketeers overseas when rapid demobilization was taking place.