Cornelius van Bynkershoek

Cornelius van Bynkershoek) (29 May 1673, in Middelburg – 16 April 1743, in The Hague) was a Dutch jurist and legal theorist who was educated at the University of Franeker.

[1] He was president of the Hoge Raad van Holland en Zeeland (Supreme Court of the Dutch Republic) from 1724 to 1743.

In particular he furthered Hugo Grotius' idea that coastal states have a right to the adjoining waters the width of which had to correspond to the capacity of exercising an effective control over it, that he expressed in his famous book De Iure Belli Ac Pacis.

However, instead of him, it was Italian Ferdinand Galiami who calculated the range of the most advanced cannon at the time to three nautical miles or a league.

This idea became common practice and was known as the "cannon shot rule" and was regarded as the internationally accepted measure of the width of the territorial sea.