International Law and Resort to Armed Force

Abstract

THE relation of war to the international system was stated by W. E. Hall in a well-known passage of his treatise in these words: ‘International law has no alternative but to accept war, independently of the justice of its origin, as a relation which the parties to it may set up if they choose, and to busy itself only in regulating the effects of the relation.’ This view, which came to be more or less generally accepted by international lawyers in the course of the nineteenth century, marked the definite abandonment of the claim of the classical jurists to distinguish between bellum iustum, and bellum iniustum, and it was in a sense an admission that international law had so far failed in the primary task of all legal systems, that of establishing and maintaining a distinction between the legal and the illegal use of force. But it had the great merit of candour, and it brought the theory of the law into accord with what had always been and still remained the facts of international practice.