The moral which I would venture to draw is, therefore, that although questions of fact, arising out of capture of a prize, might sometimes be submitted to a tribunal of arbitration, no case, involving rules of law as to which nations take different views, could possibly be so submitted.
Holland argues that while factual disputes in prize cases could be arbitrated, differing legal interpretations among nations prevent such resolutions.
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More from Thomas Erskine Holland
It is surely notorious that the delegates of a Power, by agreeing to the draft of a treaty, give to it no international validity, which results only when the treaty has been ratified by their Government.
Already in the first weeks of the war England had renounced the Declaration of London, the contents of which her own delegates had recognised as binding in international law.
The fact is that the vitally important questions of theory and practice raised by the Convention and the Declaration need calmer and better instructed discussion than they have yet received.
Its admirers have, however, too long preserved it, perhaps sub spe rati, in a state of suspended animation, using it by way of, as they supposed, a convenient handbook of maritime law for the purposes of the present war, though subject to…
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