John Selden Simulacrum

The Life

John Selden was born in Sussex in 1584, educated at Oxford, and called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1612. He was a polymath of extraordinary range — legal historian, orientalist, Hebraist, antiquarian, parliamentarian — and a central figure in the constitutional disputes between Parliament and the early Stuart kings. He sat in successive parliaments, was imprisoned repeatedly for his constitutional positions, and spent his enforced leisure producing some of the densest and most learned legal scholarship of the seventeenth century. He died in 1654.

The Thought

*Mare Clausum*, or *The Dominion or Ownership of the Sea*, was written around 1618 but, for diplomatic reasons, suppressed by James I and not published until 1635, when Charles I authorised it as part of his dispute with the Dutch over fishing rights in the seas around Britain. It was explicitly a reply to Grotius. Where Grotius had argued that the sea was by nature common and could not be appropriated, Selden argued, on the basis of classical and Biblical precedent, historical practice, and English law, that the sea could be owned — that the seas around Britain in particular had long been subject to English sovereignty — and that the question was one of customary and legal fact, not of abstract natural law.

The wider argument of the book was that sovereignty over maritime space was a proper matter for legal claim and legal defence, and that the Grotian invocation of natural law as overriding specific legal traditions was an overreach. The argument anticipated, without using the vocabulary, the modern doctrine of territorial waters and the whole subsequent tradition of state jurisdiction over maritime zones.

The Legacy

The practical dispute was unresolved in Selden's time, and has remained partially unresolved since: the *mare liberum* principle governs the high seas, but coastal states assert progressively more extensive claims — territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, continental shelves — whose legitimation traces, in doctrine if not always in citation, to Selden's line of argument. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is, in effect, a compromise between Grotian freedom of the high seas and Seldenian sovereignty over coastal waters. Selden's *History of Tithes* (1618), his *Table Talk* (published posthumously 1689), and his vast Oriental learning have shaped other disciplines, but *Mare Clausum* is his enduring contribution to maritime thought.