International Judicial Monitor
Published by the International Judicial Academy, Washington, D.C., with assistance from the
American Society of International Law

Summer 2009 Issue
 

Leading Figures in International Law

 

John Bassett Moore

By: Christine E. White, Copy Editor and Reporter, International Judicial Monitor
“Law is supposed to incorporate, not the exaggerated or disproportionate impressions freshly created by isolated events, but the mature, condensed expression of the cumulative results of long observation of human activities and need.”
(John Bassett Moore, 1924, International Law and Some Current Illusions: And Other Essays (xiv))

John Bassett MooreJohn Bassett Moore (b. 12/03/1860 – d. 11/12/1947) was a great legal mind and academician who was the United States’ leading scholar on international law and American diplomacy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is often remembered as the first American judge to serve on the Permanent Court of International Justice, predecessor to the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. In addition to his service on the PCIJ, Professor Moore held a number of prestigious diplomatic positions and published extensively on topics of international law, all of which left a noteworthy imprint on the international legal community.

A graduate of the University of Virginia, John Bassett Moore was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1883. After practicing law in Wilmington for two years, he joined the U.S. State Department where he worked as a law clerk from 1885 – 1886. Moore became a highly respected figure in the international affairs arena not long after he began working for the State Department. In 1886, he was promoted to Third Assistant Secretary of State, a position created in 1875 but abolished, in name only, by the Foreign Service Act of 1924 that did away with numerical titles for Assistant Secretary of State positions. He served at the State Department until 1891 when, at only thirty-one years of age, he left “to assume the Hamilton Fish Professorship of International Law and Diplomacy at Columbia [University Law School], the first chair in international law created in the United States.”i Moore retained his professorship at Columbia until 1924.

During his time at Columbia, Moore took leaves of absence that afforded him the opportunity to hold various diplomatic posts at the request of the U.S. government. In 1898 he returned to the State Department when he was appointed the 23rd U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, the second-ranking official in the Department, a position he held from April through mid-September. After the end of his service at the State Department, Moore traveled to Paris to serve as the secretary and counsel to the U.S. delegation at the Spanish-American Peace Commission. The Commission met from October through December to draft the Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish-American War. While at the Commission, Moore was responsible for drafting documents and articles on behalf of the U.S. delegation.

In 1904, Moore was the U.S. government’s Agent to the Arbitration Commission between the United States and the Dominican Republic set up to address the Dominican economic crisis and its inability to pay foreign debt. (Curiously, the events surrounding the Dominican economic crisis were the impetus for the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.) He was a delegate to the Fourth International Conference of American States in Buenos Aires in 1910 and was appointed to the International Commission of Jurists in 1912. In 1913, Moore became a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, based in The Hague, serving as a member of that body until 1938.

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Moore to be Counselor for the U.S. State Department, a position that replaced the Assistant Secretary of State as the second-ranking official at the State Department after the reorganization of the Department. The New York Times noted on April 6 of that year, “Professor Moore himself has perhaps the most complete knowledge of the diplomatic character and policies of the United States.” Moore remained at the State Department, his third posting there, for just under a year, having provisionally agreed to take the position in order to help transition the Department under the new administration of President Wilson.

On September 14, 1921, the League of Nations elected the individuals who would compromise the first bench of the Permanent Court of International Justice. Moore was among the group, despite the fact that the U.S. was not a member of the League. Instead, he was nominated by Italy. Moore left the PCIJ in 1938 before the end of his nine-year term to concentrate on his academic work and writings.

Even though Moore held a number of prominent positions as an international diplomat and jurist, his most enduring legacy is arguably the academic work he published throughout his career. Almost unmatched in the thoroughness with which he addressed topics, Moore wrote about issues ranging from extradition to maritime law to international adjudications. In 1898 he published the six-volume History and Digest of International Arbitrations. In American Diplomacy (1905), he took a more editorial approach, positing, “It will therefore be necessary if we [the U.S.] would fulfill the promise of our past and retain a place in the front rank, steadily to multiply our treaties and enlarge their scope.”ii

While writing American Diplomacy, Moore was also hard at work compiling his eight-volume A Digest of International Law (1906). In February, 1897, the U.S. Congress passed an act requesting a “revisiting, reindexing, and otherwise completing and perfecting … of the Digest of International Law of the United Statesiii edited by Francis Wharton in the late 1880s. Moore took on the project on a grand scale and set out, not to advance his personal views, but to record the practice of the United States with respect to international law. Because he felt that “mere extracts from state papers or judicial decisions can not be safely relied on as guides to the law,”iv he quoted documents in their entirety, gave the full history surrounding state actions and judicial decisions, described the prevailing opinion, and discussed the final solution in order to complete the Digest.

Moore was deeply troubled by the circumstances surrounding the First World War. He was a strong proponent of classical neutrality and worried that systems of alliances would cause conflicts to intensify and globalize. In response to the end of World War I, he wrote International Law and Some Current Illusions (1924), in order to, “contribute something towards the restoration of that sanity of thinking and legal and historical perspective which the recent so-called World War has so seriously disturbed.”v In the collection of essays, he cautioned against abolishing the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, discussed the effects of contraband of war on commerce, and addressed rules of aerial warfare and radio use during times of war, among other issues.

John Bassett Moore truly believed in the value of the international rule of law and transformed the study of international law into an exercise that allowed legal experts to enter into the dialogue. That his work is still relevant today proves that he was and will remain, a leading figure in international law.


[i] “THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AT COLUMBIA - An Incomparable History of Leadership in International Law.” © Copyright 2009. http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_program/intl_progs/History.

[ii] Moore, John Bassett, American Diplomacy Its Spirits and Achievements (New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1905), 253.

[iii] Moore, John Bassett, A Digest of International Law Volume I (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906), Preface.

[iv] Moore, John Bassett, A Digest of International Law Volume I (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906), Preface.

[v] Moore, John Bassett. International Law and Some Current Illusions: And Other Essays, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), vii.

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ASIl & International Judicial AcademyInternational Judicial Monitor
© 2009 – The International Judicial Academy with assistance from the American Society of International Law.

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