Up for auction a RARE! "Hague Tribunal Member"John Bassett Moore Hand Signed 3X5 Index Card.

ES-9040

John Bassett Moore

(December 3, 1860 – November 12, 1947) was an authority on international

law, who was a member of the Hague Tribunal and the

first American judge to serve on the Permanent Court of International

Justice (the "World Court"). Moore was born in Smyrna,

Delaware, graduated from the University of Virginia in 1880, and was

admitted to the Delaware bar in 1883. From 1885 to 1886 he was a law clerk

at the Department of State, then

an Assistant Secretary of State.

In 1891 he took the first full professorship of international law at Columbia University;he stayed there until 1924. During

his service with the Department of State he acted as secretary to the

Conference on Samoan Affairs (1887) and to the Fisheries Conference (1887–88). While

holding the chair of international law and diplomacy at Columbia, Professor

Moore was frequently granted leave of absence to accept appointments in the

public interest. For part of 1898 he served as Assistant Secretary and Acting

Secretary of State, and after the close of the war with Spain was secretary and

council to the American Peace Commission

at Paris. In 1901, he served as professor of International Law at the Naval War College, where

he initiated that college's long series of "International Law Blue

Book" publications. Subsequently, Moore represented the government as

agent before the United States and Dominican Arbitration Tribunal (1904), as

delegate to the Fourth International American Conference

at Buenos Aires

and special plenipotentiary to the Chilean centenary (both

1910), and as delegate to the International Commission of Jurists at Rio de

Janeiro (1912). He was on the Hague Tribunal from 1912 to 1938, and

was a judge of the Permanent Court of International

Justice from 1920 to 1928. Moore was a proponent of neutrality,

believing that the post-World War I system of alliances would tend to

broaden wars into global conflicts. He was also a strong believer in the

principle of separation of

powers under the United States Constitution, asserting in 1921,

"There can hardly be room for doubt that the framers of the

constitution, when they vested in Congress the power to

declare war, never imagined that they were leaving it to the

executive to use the military and naval forces of the United States all over

the world for the purpose of actually coercing other nations, occupying their

territory, and killing their soldiers and citizens, all according to his own

notions of the fitness of things, as long as he refrained from calling his

action war or persisted in calling it peace. Moore was honored on a U.S. definitive

postage stamp issued December 3, 1966, the five-dollar value of the Prominent Americans series. In 1922, a new

school was dedicated to Moore in his hometown of Smyrna, Delaware. The John

Bassett Moore Intermediate School now serves as a public school for the fifth

and sixth grades. Moore is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City.