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Discovery Rights and the Arctic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2019
Abstract
This article examines whether discovery could, contrary to common philosophical opinion, be taken seriously as a ground of territorial rights. I focus on the discovery of uninhabitable lands such as found in the Arctic. After surveying the role of discovery in Roman private law and modern international law, I turn to Locke's well-known theory or original acquisition. I argue that many of the justifications that do the work in Locke's theory also apply to discovery. I then discuss some of the many reasons why discovery may seem unpromising as a ground of original acquisition. I close by arguing that if there is a bridge mechanism by which property can legitimately transform into territory and if, at least in some circumstances, discovery can produce property rights, then it would follow that in some circumstances discovery could also produce territorial rights.
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References
1 For instance, the Russian claim for Wrangel Island in the Arctic is based on the ground of discovery, as reported in ‘Laurence Collier, Memorandum Respecting Territorial Claims in the Arctic to 1930, 10 February 1930’, in Kikkert, Peter and Lackenbauer, P. Whitney, Legal Appraisals of Canada's Arctic Sovereignty: Key Documents, 1905–56 (Calgary: Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary, 2014), 121–2Google Scholar. Norway based its claims for the Sverdrup Islands on this ground as mentioned in the same memorandum, at 132, 134–135. Canada's appeal to discovery rights can be found, for example, in ‘Memorandum, W. F. King, Chief Astronomer, to Hon. Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior, Report upon the Title of Canada to the Islands North of the Mainland of Canada, 23 January 1904’ and various other internal memoranda, such as those by L. C. Christie, J. B. Harkin, and E. R. Hopkins, in Kikkert and Lackenbauer, Legal Appraisals of Canada's Arctic Sovereignty: Key Documents, 1905–56, 4, 7, 8, 12, 260. This research has been possible thanks to a generous grant by the Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I would like to thank the editors of this journal and two reviewers who remain anonymous, as well as Dr Cara Nine who disclosed her identity at the final review stage, for their excellent comments and corrections. Thanks are due also to Professor Chris Armstrong and Professor Anna Stilz for their generous and useful advice. I am grateful to Yulia Erfurt, who provided excellent research assistance and Dr Elizabeth Miles who carefully edited the final version.
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36 Kantorovich argues that ‘If A ‘discovers’ X but mistakenly identifies it with Y, we cannot say that A discovered X, even if X turns out to be useful and of interest.’ Scientific Discovery, 15.
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39 So the Jesuit José de Acosta wrote in a book first published in 1590: ‘Everybody knows that many or even most of the regions that have been discovered in this New World have been discovered in this way, more thanks to the violence of tempests than to the good industry of the discoverers.’ de Acosta, José, Historia natural y moral de las indias, c. 19, 18 (Madrid: Historia 16, 1987), 109Google Scholar.
40 I would like to thank Cara Nine for this suggestion.
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57 I do not discuss here the openness of other approaches such as Liberal Nationalist, Self-Determination, and Kantian or Legitimacy-based approaches to discovery rights. While none of these approaches endorses discovery rights over unoccupied land, there is nothing in them that necessarily rules them out.
58 See Miller, Territorial Rights, 258, where he argues that territorial rights require a transformative relationship to land effected through long occupation which makes the territory ‘materially valuable because it has been improved in a way that reflects their [the occupant group's] needs and cultural values’, as well as symbolically transformed.
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65 Nine has subsequently explored an alternative approach based on compromise between claims, partly motivated by the irrelevance of settlement and adjacency claims, which do not apply in much of the Arctic. See ‘Compromise and Original Acquisition: Explaining Rights to the Arctic’, 32 Social Philosophy and Policy (2015), 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recently, she has explored the application of Pufendorf's criteria for the acquisition of territorial rights over ocean portions to questions concerning passage and exploitation of Canada's Northern Passage. See Nine, Cara, ‘Right to the Oceans: Foundational Arguments Reconsidered’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 2019(36): 626–642CrossRefGoogle Scholar.