of particular terns is explained by reference to local circumstances and conditions the framers had in mind at the time.
Jurists are generally agreed in laying down certain rules of construction and interpretation as being applicable when disagreement takes place between the parties to a treaty as to the meaning or intention of its stipulations. Some of these rules are either unsafe in their application or are of doubtful applicability; and rules tainted by any shade of doubt, from whatever source it may be derived, are unfit for use in international controversy.[1]
Since the time of Grotius, who devoted an entire chapter to the construction and interpretation of difficult and ambiguous terms, (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, ii. c, XVI.), the system of rules which he founded has been revised and reproduced by Puffendorf (V. c. XII), by Domat (Cushing’s Ed. I, p. 108), by Vattel (ii, c. XVII.), and by Rutherforth (II, c. 7). The best parts of the work of each are embodied in Potter’s Dwarris on Statutes and Constitutions, pp. 121–146, and also in Wildman’s Institutes of Int. Law. I, pp. 176–186. These should be supplemented by the expositions of Heffter, Sec. 95; Phillimore, II, c. VIII; Calvo, Secs. 713–77; Fiore, Secs. 1117–31; Hall, Secs. 111, 112. and Savigny’s exposition of “fundamental rules of interpretation” in his System des Heutigen Römischen Rechts (Vol. 1. ch. IV., Sec. XXXIII).
No publicist of recent times is more often quoted throughout the English-speaking world than William Edward Hall, who, after rejecting all rules of interpretation of doubtful authority, says: “1.—When the language of a treaty, taken in the ordinary meaning of the words, yields a plain and reasonable sense, it must be taken as intended to be read in that sense, subject to the qualifications, that any words which may have a customary meaning in treaties, differing from their common signification, must be understood to have that meaning, and that a sense cannot be adopted which leads to an absurdity, or to incompatibility of the contract with an accepted fundamental principle of law. * * 3.—When the words of a treaty fail to yield a plain and reasonable sense they should be interpretated in such one of the following ways as may be appropriate: (a) By recourse to the general sense and spirit of the treaty as shown by the context of the incomplete,
- ↑ Hall, Int. Law, pp. 350.
