In his Examination of the British doctrine which subjects to capture a neutral trade not open in time of peace (1806), the would-be fourth president of the United States, James Madison, affirmed that ‘[t]he reputation that Vattel enjoys in Great Britain, greater perhaps than he enjoys anywhere else, requires that he should be particularly consulted on this subject’. Madison did not stress the ‘originality of his plan, or his matter’, which he suggested Vattel had derived from the German philosopher Christian Wolff, but rather the way in which the Swiss jurist ‘in many instances, improved the doctrines of all his predecessors’.1 Madison’s consideration about Vattel’s reputation in Britain is confirmed by the numerous references to the author of the Law of Nations in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English and Scottish journals.