ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Francisco de Vitoria insofar as his texts are relevant to the subject of global law: his general conception of a political commonwealth, organized according to republican motives; how this is integrated with his thoughts on papal and ecclesiastic power; his ideas of positive law and public authority; the transfer of these motives to the global scale; his postulation of globally valid individual rights based on natural and on positive international law. The chapter points out some ambivalences resulting both from the political use that colonists made of Vitoria’s suggestions, and from the formal way in which he presented them, allowing their exploitation in the first place. However, critics targeting these ambivalences disagree about whether global law should be more or less interventionist. Interestingly, both types of criticism can be discerned in today’s reception of Vitoria as well as in some of his contemporaries’ reactions.
