ORAL ARGUMENT OF SIR CHARLES RUSSELL, Q. C. M. P. 121 



has to administer is something? entirely different from the law it lias to 

 administer as a municipal Court. Let me explain that point, and i)ass 

 on. Let me assume for a moment that the Counsel for the United 

 States, in those proeeedinj>s, had said to the judge: "We are claiming 

 that you, this Court, shall exercise functions as an international tri- 

 bunal, as a Prize Court, and that you shall proceed to pass judgment 

 upon the question whether this seizure for the cause that we allege was 

 justified by International Law." 



What would liave been the first thing that the Judge must have 

 done when that contention was put before him? The first thing he 

 must have done would be to say this: "Then if I am sitting in an 

 international Court, and exercising the functions of a Prize Court, 

 municipal law is not my guide." 



1 will take the ground my learned friends put when they say they 

 are entitled to do anything, within certain reasonable limits, necessary 

 for the protection of their property and of their interests. Immediately 

 the Judge would be obliged to consider — would necessarily be face to 

 face with the consideration — whether international law, under such, 

 circumstances, justified the seizure at all; and, in the next place, 

 whether international law annexed to the offence, alleged to have been 

 committed against international law, the particular sanction of search 

 and seizure of the vessel which the Government had adopted, to say 

 nothing of the further sanctions of imprisonment of the men and con- 

 fiscation of the vessels which that Government demanded. But there 

 is not a trace of the suggestion in the whole of the judgment or in the 

 brief to which I have already referred, that the Judge was asked to 

 consider the question in any other aspect than that of municipal law. 



Now since I am upon this, and it is also relevant to the character of 

 the right — the exclusive jurisdiction and the exclusive rights referred 

 to in question 1 — I have followed up to the end these proceedings in 

 the "Sayward" Case, and I have before me here — Mr. Justice Harlan 

 will recognize it — the .shorthand report of the argument of the Solicitor 

 General of the United States, who appeared before the Supreme Court 

 at Washington in answer to an a])plication for a prohibition; and I beg 

 the Tribunal to recollect that this brings us down to a period as late as 

 1892, last year, at the time when the Treaty was being discussed; 

 and I will read to the Court the ground upon which that learned 

 gentleman in a very able argument puts the case of the United 

 ,8G5 States. I will hand this copy of the proceedings in the case, if 

 it is not already in the possession of the Tribunal, to any mem- 

 ber who wishes it. I read from page 54 ; this is the Argument. "What 

 we say from that" — (that is, after he has stated the municipal legisla- 

 tion and the derivative title under Russia) — "is that all the territorial 

 jurisdiction of the United States acquired from Eussia is included 

 within the jurisdiction of the Alaska Court, and is equally within the 

 limitation of section 1956, and that if rights were acquired in Behring 

 Sea by the cession from Russia — and no rights were otherwise acquired — 

 that section 1956 extends over all the territory or dominion which 

 was acquired by that treaty of cession. We do not deny that the juris- 

 diction of the District Court of Alaska and that the venue of the 

 offence were originally questions to be decided by that Court, and to 

 be decided by tliis Court in a proper case when properly here raised. 

 What we assert is that the jurisdiction of that Court, and the venue of 

 the offence, by a single stei) is made inevitably to depend upon the 

 national jurisdiction in the waters of Behring Sea; that that is a polit- 



