La Question de l'Alabama et le droit des gens

First edition (cf. Sabin, 64,876).

Spine cracked with small losses; slight marginal tears and losses to the wrappers.

The subject of this dissertation does not, of course, concern the State of the same name (a member of the Confederacy during the Civil War), but the vessel, the CSS Alabama, a sloop of war with combined steam and sail propulsion, built in Great Britain in 1862. It served in the Confederate States Navy until it was sunk on 19 June 1864 following a naval engagement with the Union sloop of war USS Kearsarge off the port of Cherbourg, France.

In the aftermath of the war arose the Alabama Claims, demands for damages brought by the Federal Government of the United States against the Government of the United Kingdom for the latter’s clandestine assistance to the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

The dispute was resolved only by recourse to an international court of arbitration which sat at Geneva in 1872 and was composed of representatives of the United Kingdom (Alexander Cockburn), the United States (Charles Francis Adams, Sr.), the Kingdom of Italy (Federigo Sclopis), the Swiss Confederation (Jakob Stämpfli), and the Empire of Brazil (Marcos Antônio de Araújo).

The Alabama Claims case marked the first submission of an inter-state dispute to supra-national arbitration, and the tribunal convened for this purpose laid the foundations of modern public international law. The lawyer Paul-Ernest Pradier-Fodéré (1827–1904) was a specialist in international law, which he had been teaching since 1857.