Hybrid | Original Acquisition and Consent

Original Acquisition and Consent: On the Paradoxical Foundation of the Acquisition of Rights in Hugo Grotius

Please note that the time allocated for this seminar will be devoted to discussion of the paper.

Speaker: Jakob Rendl (University of Vienna)

About this event

The goal of the survey of Grotius’ writings is to show that the core concepts of international law show a highly paradoxical and problematic structure. They are built around a peculiar figure of thought that appears to be of crucial importance for the understanding of the history of international law and its deficiencies until today. This conceptual figure the chapter focuses upon is the consented occupation or conventional occupation. As will be shown in the three sections of the chapter, Grotius’s writings are suitable to shed a light on the role this concept plays in legal theory. It appears to be – paradoxically – the foundation for the three manifestations of contractual agreement: the private law contract, the social contract, and the international treaty. Against this background, it is the aim of this paper to show that the fundamental problem in the Grotian natural private law approach to contracts seems to be that contracts are understood only as instruments for the coordination of unilateral acts and not for the unification of wills.

About the speaker

Jakob is a PhD candidate in legal philosophy at the University of Vienna Law School. He holds a master’s degree in law and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Vienna. Jakob is currently a University Assistant at the Department of Legal Philosophy at the University of Vienna Law School. He has done research on his PhD project on supranational integration at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Law Faculty. His latest articles, Jakob focused on historical conceptualisations of international law (“Hegel’s concept of international law”, published by Verlag Österreich 2023) and on the European Union (“Messianism, Exodus, and the Empty Signifier of the European Union” together with Alexander Somek in Jan Komárek, European Constitutional Imagineries, Oxford University Press 2023).

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