CSLS Speaker Series – “For Itself and for Mankind”: John Marshall Harlan, Species Extinction, and the Fur Seal Trial of 1893

featuring Rebecca M. McLennan, Preston Hotchkis Chair in the History of the United States, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Drawn from an ongoing book project, this paper surfaces the history of a once-famous, now-forgotten legal dispute over access to the Bering Sea and the right to hunt a species on the brink of extinction. The so-called “fur seal trial,” or Bering Sea Arbitration Tribunal of 1893, was convened in Paris to settle a seal hunting dispute between Great Britain and the United States: seven years prior, the U.S. Revenue Marine had seized three Canadian, therefore British-flagged, sealing schooners on the Bering Sea (which lies between Alaska and Northeast Asia). Confiscating the schooners’ tackle and cargo and beaching the vessels, the USRM Corwin conveyed the captains and first mates to the mainland, where the men were prosecuted for violating federal hunting laws. In his charge to the jury, the federal judge declared most of the Bering Sea mare clausum—a sovereign American sea, fully subject to federal law. Juries convicted the men, and they were fined and sentenced to prison. Over the next five years the U.S. confiscated or warned off another seventeen British schooners, many miles from U.S. shores. Diplomacy deadlocked and navies mobilized. Finally, the U.S. and Britain agreed to submit their dispute to a specially constituted international arbitration court. More than a dozen of the world’s leading jurists—including U.S. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan, English Lord of Appeal James Hannen, and Baron Alphonse Chodron de Courcel—gathered in an elegant Parisian stateroom to hear lengthy oral arguments about U.S. claims to the seal, the sea, and who—or what—was responsible for driving the species to the brink of extinction.