Prize law was a legal regime that played a crucial role in maritime trade and warfare in the European imperial world before the twentieth century, governing both the capture and disposition of enemy property seized by belligerents at sea during wartime. Prize law outlined the rules by which captures were to take place and how captured property was to be handled, adjudicated, and (if “condemned” or deemed a valid capture), disposed of. All European maritime powers had prize regimes during the early modern era, which collectively adjudicated the fates of tens of thousands of vessels worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of today’s dollars. This article examines the procedural law of prize in the long eighteenth century: the rules that governed how legal actors in the prize regime brought cases before tribunals and the tribunals’ rules for adjudicating them. It shows that the law of prize was an interpolity legal regime, generated within the ambiguous legal spaces that existed between the jurisdictional boundaries of individual states and empires. The article focuses on three important areas of procedural law for evidence of the interpolity character of the prize regime. It looks first at the distinctive role played by mariners in prize procedures. Captains of privateers and other capturing vessels functioned as quasi-officers of the court, responsible for assembling the documentary record that prize tribunals used to adjudicate captures and bringing the cases before the courts. Imperial prize regulations gave almost no guidance on the rules that they were to follow. The proper procedures were defined by mariners and merchants themselves, as unwritten rules articulated at sea. Second, we turn to how the prize tribunals managed language diversity and translation. I show that, a few exceptions aside, prize tribunals did not acknowledge linguistic difference among litigants. Instead, the tribunals relied on silent and often unacknowledged translation processes, which embedded in their proceedings a fiction that all of the actors before them communicated in a common language. Last, the article shows that prize tribunals applied foreign law in their proceedings, in ways that were not formally authorized by imperial law. By focusing on the neglected procedural law of prize, this article offers a different view of the prize regime than the one that has been painted by many studies of substantive law of prize in the long eighteenth century, in at least two ways. One is that studying the procedural law of prize casts into sharp relief the bottom-up character of prize law. Far from being dictated by sovereigns or from imperial centers, much about the prize regime was created informally by lower-level legal actors. Second, a focus on procedural law reveals important continuities in prize law across space and time. Substantive prize law during the period saw extensive debates about the nature of neutral rights, among other issues, with different empires articulating radically different doctrines. The procedural law of prize, true to its interpolity origins, remained remarkably constant across empires and over time.

中文翻译：

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18 世纪的刑权国际法律制度：奖品的程序法


战利品法是一种法律制度，在 20 世纪之前欧洲帝国世界的海上贸易和战争中发挥着至关重要的作用，管理战时交战方在海上扣押的敌方财产的捕获和处置。奖品法概述了进行捕获的规则，以及如何处理、裁决和处置捕获的财产（如果“被谴责”或被视为有效的捕获）。在近代早期，所有欧洲海洋强国都有战利品制度，这些制度共同裁决了数万艘价值相当于今天数亿美元的船只的命运。本文研究了漫长的 18 世纪的奖品程序法：管理奖品制度中的法律行为者如何向法庭提起诉讼的规则以及法庭的裁决规则。它表明，奖品法是一种插权性法律制度，产生于各个国家和帝国的管辖边界之间存在的模糊法律空间内。本文重点介绍了程序法的三个重要领域，以证明奖品制度的插补性。它首先着眼于海员在奖品程序中发挥的独特作用。私掠船和其他捕获船只的船长充当法院的准官员，负责收集奖励法庭用来裁决捕获的书面记录，并将案件提交法院。帝国奖品规定几乎没有关于他们应该遵循的规则的指导。适当的程序是由水手和商人自己定义的，就像在海上阐明的不成文规则一样。其次，我们转向奖项评审团如何管理语言多样性和翻译。 我表明，除了少数例外情况外，奖品法庭并不承认诉讼当事人之间的语言差异。相反，法庭依赖于无声且通常不被承认的翻译过程，这在他们的诉讼程序中嵌入了一个虚构，即他们之前的所有行为者都用共同的语言进行交流。最后，文章指出，奖品法庭在其诉讼中以帝国法律未正式授权的方式适用外国法律。通过关注被忽视的奖品程序法，本文提供了与漫长的 18 世纪许多奖品实体法研究所描绘的不同视角。一是研究奖品的程序法则，突出了奖品法自下而上的特征。奖品制度远非由君主或帝国中心决定，而大部分关于奖品制度都是由较低级别的法律行为者非正式地建立的。其次，对程序法的关注揭示了奖品法在空间和时间上的重要连续性。这一时期的实体奖法见证了关于中立权利的性质的广泛辩论，以及其他问题，不同的帝国表达了截然不同的教义。奖品的程序法则忠实于其性起源，在不同帝国和不同时期都保持了非常稳定的状态。