Res Nullius
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
res nullius · no man's goods
in the texts
Ancient Law
Roman legal category of things belonging to no one, capable of being acquired by the first occupant.
The objects which the Roman lawyers called res nullius—things which have not or have never had an owner—can only be ascertained by enumerating them.
As the later writers on the Law of Nature have always been anxious to maintain that private property was in some sense sanctioned by the system which they were expounding, the hypothesis that an enemy’s property is res nullius has seemed to them perverse and shocking, and they were careful to stigmatise it as a mere fiction of jurisprudence.
When possession is taken of a “res nullius,” that is, of an object which is not, or has never been, reduced to dominion, the possessor is permitted to become proprietor from a feeling that all valuable things are naturally the subjects of an exclusive enjoyment, and that in the given case there is no one to invest with the right of property except the Occupant.
The Freedom of the Seas (Mare Liberum)
The legal doctrine of ownerless property, applied to reject the claim that the East Indies were free for the taking.
But in addition to all this, discovery per se gives no legal rights over things unless before the alleged discovery they were res nullius.
Wherefore, since both possession and a title of possession are lacking, and since the property and the sovereignty of the East Indies ought not to be considered as if they had previously been res nullius, and since, as they belong to the East Indians, they could not have been acquired legally by other persons, it follows that the East Indian nations in question are not the chattels of the Portugue …