Question

The doctrinal schism between Hugo Grotius’s *Mare Liberum* (1609) and John Selden’s *Mare Clausum* (1635) represents the foundational dialectic in the development of international maritime law. Grotius, writing originally to defend the Dutch East India Company’s seizure of a Portuguese galleon in the Strait of Singapore, posited that the sea was necessarily international territory. His central jurisprudential premise was inextricably tied to Roman property law and was essentially twofold: first, that the establishment of property inherently requires physical occupation, which the fluid, transient, and physically boundless nature of the ocean actively resists; and second, that resources which cannot be exhausted by communal use—such as navigation and pelagic fishing—are structurally exempt from privatization under the dictates of natural law. By this logic, any attempt to monopolize the maritime commons was not merely a political overreach, but a profound violation of natural law itself.

Selden, commissioned by the British Crown to furnish a theoretical framework for excluding Dutch fishermen from the lucrative herring grounds of the North Sea, countered that the historical practice of European states fundamentally contradicted Grotian natural law. Selden argued that the sea could indeed be appropriated as sovereign territory, demonstrating through a meticulous compilation of historical legal treatises that coastal waters had been routinely policed, taxed, and partitioned by temporal authorities since antiquity. For Selden, the technological limitations of early modern naval enforcement did not invalidate the theoretical right of sovereignty; he noted astutely that terrestrial borders were often equally porous, vast, and imperfectly defended, yet their legal validity remained entirely unquestioned by natural law theorists.

A close examination of Grotius’s subsequent, often overlooked correspondence reveals a pragmatic modulation of his otherwise absolutist stance. While Grotius publicly maintained that the ocean’s fluid nature categorically prevented continuous occupation, he conceded in a series of unpublished letters to French jurists that narrow geographic straits—provided they were completely commanded by coastal artillery from both adjacent shores—might momentarily constitute a legitimate form of localized jurisdiction. Crucially, however, Grotius rigidly stipulated that even such localized jurisdiction could never mature into a permanent right of exclusion against foreign vessels engaged in peaceful transit, as the overarching natural law imperative of global commerce unequivocally superseded any momentary martial advantage. Selden’s framework, conversely, made no such distinction between peaceful transit and commercial exploitation, asserting that the sovereign possessed an absolute, unqualified prerogative to arbitrarily deny passage through any waters over which it could project sustained military power. The eventual synthesis of these paradigms into the modern framework of territorial waters and the exclusive economic zone would not fully crystalize until the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in the late twentieth century, but the parameters of the debate were irrevocably established by the Grotian-Seldenian divide.

Based on the passage, which of the following accurately describes a condition under which Grotius conceded that a legitimate form of localized jurisdiction over maritime territory might momentarily exist?