Julius Hatschek, Outline of International Law, G. Bell & Sons, 1930, pp v-vi.
Now that Great Britain, by ratifying the ‘Optional’ Clause of the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice, has engaged to accept on legal issues the rulings of an international body of judges whose decisions do not need to be unanimously voted, it may be hoped that the English jurist’s education will come to include a closer study than in the past of the great Continental writers on whose doctrines the majority of those judges will have been trained.
When an English biologist reads the book of a German biologist he is reading German thought on a single subject, namely, biology, in which they will both have served their intellectual apprenticeship. But neither an English nor a German jurist has been trained on law, as such. The former will have cut his professional teeth on English law – the latter on German Recht. Trained in two distinct disciplines, they meet for disputation on a neutral plane, the plane of international law, a plane, that is, on which neither of them has received his fundamental schooling as a thinker. Will it be surprising if sometimes a given problem presents itself to such mutually strange mentalities in somewhat dissimilar guises? For the former it will be a problem not too bafflingly different from some problem of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence with which he is already acquainted. Correspondingly, for the latter, it is from some German problem that light will be expected and obtained.
For the needs of a specialist there can be no adequate substitute for a reading of the French, German, and Italian writers in the original. But not everyone is a specialist or inclined, from the outset, to wrestle with a given foreign tongue. Some are taking soundings before embarking upon any form of intensive specialisation. Others are laymen who can be as content with an impressionistic sketch as with a direct vision of what it portrays. For these two classes of
reader an attempt, in English words, to convey the contours, the atmosphere, the general approach, of a German’s thinking may be of greater value than an effort to isolate the hard kernel of the German thought and to rethink and restate it in a congenially English manner. There may even be some excuse, in such an attempt, for wilfully avoiding a familiar English term, with the irrelevant, because natively English, associations that it must inevitably evoke, in favour of some barbarous corruption coined for the occasion as seeming a
little better calculated to carry into an English mind a necessarily alien idea. If the present translation has at all achieved its purpose an English student will sample it with the feeling that there is something neither English, nor international, about the mental background from which the discussion
proceeds.
The book was first published in Germany, under the title of Völkerrecht im Grundriss, in 1926; hence there are inevitably points of detail in which it is not up-to-date – e.g. the position of the Pope; but I have not undertaken to emend
it or to exercise any editorial responsibility.
I desire to thank the publishers and Miss Gertrude Massé for relieving me of the labour of making the Index in consideration of the many new calls on my time occasioned by my removal from Oxford to London.
C. A. W. M.
C.A.W. Manning 