The Bering Sea Fur Seal Arbitration—The Lawyers Try, But Fail, to Save the Seals

• Main Author: Crook, John R
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2024
• Subjects: Bering Sea; Pacific; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848086.003.0002; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/58158043/oso-9780192848086-chapter-2.pdf

Abstract In 1893, the United States and the United Kingdom resorted to international arbitration to resolve a bitter dispute triggered by US arrests of Canadian vessels hunting fur seals at sea in the North Pacific. The fashion industry’s demand for seal furs had led to extensive pelagic hunting that threatened the seal herd’s survival. The United States claimed rights to protect the seals, which summered and gave birth to their young on the US-owned Pribilof Islands, partly based on misunderstandings regarding historic Russian rights thought to have been acquired with the US purchase of Alaska. The arbitration tribunal rejected these US claims to jurisdiction and its invitation to develop nineteenth-century international law to protect a threatened species. While the tribunal ruled for the United Kingdom, it also exercised an unusual power to devise its own regime intended to preserve the seals. The tribunal’s regime, proclaimed without a sound scientific foundation, failed and pelagic sealing increased. As the seal population neared collapse, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed in 1911 on the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, a landmark in the development of international law for the protection of living resources.