The Laws of Maritime Piracy

The purpose of this volume is to provide a doctrinal account of the international law of the sea applicable to piracy.

This is not, unfortunately, an entirely straightforward undertaking. Piracy, as a legal concept, has not had a stable meaning over time. Instead, it has been given different work to do in different times in respect of different enemies. At each historical juncture when piracy has been a subject of significant contention, those attempting to reduce the law as it stands to writing have been faced with a task less of codifying the law and more of inventing it. Paradoxically, perhaps, this should make studying the modern law of piracy relatively simple, at least in comparison to earlier periods of uncertainty. The major legal codification (or invention) exercises of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas or the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea have at least left us with a generally agreed upon set of texts which constitute the black letter law (‘the Geneva Convention’ and ‘UNCLOS’ respectively). However, in both cases the travaux préparatoires – in the strict sense of the documents, debates and records left by the treaty conferences themselves – are generally silent on why the relevant forms of words were adopted. This should leave us, as international lawyers, solely with the job of interpreting the words used in these treaties by taking them in context and giving them their ordinary meaning, and in light of any relevant subsequent state practice.