Reader Hal Davis is a constant source of provocative links and excerpts — too many for me to write about them all. But this one is easy.
Hal says he's reading up on Hugo Grotius, legal theorist of the 1600s. Who isn't?
A workable formula [to the problem of conflicting national claims of dominion over the seas] was found by Cornelius Bynkershoek in his De dominio maris (1702), restricting maritime dominion to the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it. This became universally adopted and developed into the three-mile limit.
Hal says: "This snippet suggests, not quite that that the Supreme Court follows the election returns, but that legal theory often accepts facts on the ground."
Except that the theories become enshrined in some minds forever, even after the facts become irrelevant in the present world.
