Laurens Winkel, born in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1949. LL.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Professor of Legal History at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Fellow (1 February 2005 – 30 June 2005)
DE IURE PRAEDAE AND THE GROTIAN CONCEPT OF RIGHTS
During my stay at NIAS, several publications were prepared and six papers presented on different occasions. George Wright and I prepared the footnotes to chapter I-III of De iure praedae (DIP) for the new electronic edition. I also collected material for an article against the well known thesis of Richard Tuck, according to which subjective rights in the modern sense found their origin in the seventeenth century. The structure of De iure praedae was analysed in two ways. First concerning the relation between general legal principles and concrete rules in international law and chapter II in particular reveals the new and important role for legal principles.
Second, I looked at the structure of DIP as a legal treatise. In comparison to De iure belli ac pacis (DIBAP), DIP has preserved largely a form which is dependent on the jurisprudence of late scholasticism and the School of the Post-Glossators. DIBAP, however, was modelled more after the Institutes of Justinian, which is in accordance with general tendencies of legal humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Finally, I did research on the development of principles of natural law. Whereas natural law in DIP is still largely dependent on theology, natural law in DIBAP is solidly based on the reception of Roman law and on canon law. The importance of Grotius in this respect can be illustrated once more.