The just-war tradition, inherited directly from the Middle Ages, continued to be the dominant framework for legal analyses of war throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, the Dutch judge Cornelius van Bynkershoek, writing in 1738, defined war as ‘a contest of independent persons carried on by force or fraud for the sake of asserting their rights’. Vattel, in a similar spirit, referred to the right of states ‘to use force to obtain justice, if it can not otherwise be had, or to follow up one's rights by force of arms’. In the 1760s, William Blackstone, the influential English legal commentator, defined war as ‘an appeal to the God of hosts to punish such infractions of public faith as are committed by one independent people against another; neither state having any superior jurisdiction to resort to upon earth for justice’. These expressions of just-war sentiments, however, were anachronisms by the time they were pronounced.