Laws of the Sea

Reprint of the 1818, first English-language edition. Originally published in Altona (Hamburg) in 1815, under the title of, Seerecht des Friedens und des Krieges in Bezug auf die Kauffahrteischifffart. Marvin spoke highly of this work in his Legal Bibliography (1847), noting that few have equaled his wide range of research and depth of learning (418-419). As late as 1921, G.L. Canfield, writing in the Michigan Law Review, called this work "one of the pleasures of the legal bibliophile" that "remain[s] essential today to a practitioner's library (19:580-582). Jacobsen [1774-1822], a German jurist, was an internationally recognized authority on maritime law. Laws of the Sea is based on a sixteen-year study of the laws of Italy, France, Great Britain, Holland, Denmark and Germany. It remains the most thorough single-volume study of English and continental maritime law in the early nineteenth century, a turbulent era shaped by the French Revolution and Napoleon.