Emanuele Salerno

The article examines the manuscript authored by the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Frosini (1654–1733), written in the context of the bellum diplomaticum between the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Holy Roman Empire over the succession of Tuscany during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Throughout this international controversy, the Tuscan ruling class and its jurists were engaged in defending the autonomy and independence of the Tuscan ‘small state’ against imperial expansion, by examining the erudite works of the exponents of the ‘modern natural law school’. Notably, the Tuscan legal scholars, trained at the University of Pisa, drew on these auctoritates in a deliberately instrumental manner, extracting from their weighty treatises precisely those arguments best suited to advance selected principles of public law within international public opinion, immediately before, during, and after the numerous multilateral diplomatic conferences of the period, with the aim of negotiating their outcomes. In his Legal Discourse on the Liberty of the Florentine State (1715), Francesco Frosini – graduated in law at the University of Pisa, and in his capacity of Archbishop with a considerable formal standing within the academic hierarchy – quoted extensively from Grotius and his major commentators, notably Gronovius and Van der Muelen, and thereby also Pufendorf, placing them alongside the works of German public lawyers such as Ziegler, Multz, Besold, and others. The central objective of this unpublished legal opinion was to demonstrate that the Diploma issued by the Emperor Charles V on 28 October 1530 – concluded in the wake of the capitulations of the Florentine Republic on 12 August of the same year – was never intended as an act of sovereign acquisition. Accordingly, it could not legitimately be invoked by imperial jurists, in their eighteenth-century historical-legal texts, as evidence of the ‘suppression of the ancient liberty of Florence’, as Frosini explicitly maintained.

This article examines whether the publication of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (ibp) constitutes a Grotian Moment. After a brief sketch of ibp’s early reception, we focus on the book’s uses in teaching, identifying and creating international law in the twenty-first century, and that ibp’s authority looms large in State practice, in opinio iuris, and in both scholarly and applied understandings of customary international law. While the publication of ibp meets the technical definition of a Grotian Moment, unquestioned invocations of ibp’s authority and contents are anachronistic and should be discontinued.

The review examines the bibliographical features of the first complete Italian translation of Grotius’ magnum opus, _De iure belli ac pacis_ (IBP). This new Italian edition faithfully presents the entirety of Grotius’ text, based on the 1646 edition—the final version supervised by the author himself and the most comprehensive, as it includes the Annotata and all the supplementary materials from the 1642 IBP edition. Moreover, it adopts the division of paragraphs into sub-paragraphs, a structural refinement first introduced in the 1667 edition edited by Grotius’ son, Pieter. The translation is presented across three volumes, each corresponding to one of the three books of the IBP. In this new edition, the reader will encounter a translation that is both precise and sophisticated from a doctrinal perspective. The translators, all distinguished scholars, have meticulously avoided any anachronistic application of categories from legal-political philosophy that would be incongruous with Grotius’ theoretical and practical culture (cf. Antonio Del Vecchio and Carlo Galli, vol. I, pp. CXXVII-CXXXII). Indeed, the co-authors, editors, and translators have paid scrupulous attention to conceptual discontinuities within lexical continuity, following the exemplary methodological approach of the late Merio Scattola, to whose memory this translation is dedicated.

This article sheds light on Grotius’s writings on slavery and the polyvalent ways in which his ideas have been interpreted and applied throughout history. The article focuses, in particular, on a tension at the heart of the Grotian theory of natural rights, as articulated in De iure belli ac pacis (ibp). Grotius’s views on slavery have attracted the attention of generations of legal scholars, who debated and explored them in courts of justice, in international disputes, and on the margins of their own copies of Grotius’s magnum opus. Overall, this article shows that despite the rise in popularity of other authors and new ideologies, Grotius’s influence in debates about slavery and abolitionism endured well into the modern age.

This note studies the 1650 edition of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis. Using online and card catalogues, we have located eighty-nine copies, thirty-seven of which we examined in person, with an additional six fully digitised copies online. We hope that this research note on the preliminary results will generate greater interest in this unduly neglected edition. The note shows how, despite the connection established in the history of seventeenth-century politics that emphasized the ties between Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia, the reception of Grotius’s 1650 edition bore no relation to the debates at Osnabrück and Münster. However, this is an influential edition, cherished by collectors and authors. According to our findings, it would be reproduced in a number of later reprints.

This chapter describes the process of institutionalization of natural law at the University of Pisa, essential to interpreting the conditions in which the first public law chair of Italy was founded. The study of legal education in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century will allow a more in-depth understanding of both the development of natural law in teaching practice throughout the long eighteenth century, and the features of the two processes of reception, respectively for educational and political purposes. In fact, although both processes were founded on appreciation of the centrality of Roman law and philosophy in the construction of doctrines by the so-called ‘modern natural law school’, and developed through mediation of traditional Roman legal culture of the Pisan ‘historical-critical school’, there were some differences. In this initial phase, the didactic reception was indirect, although not entirely implicit, whereas the political reception was direct and explicit.