ABSTRACT
TRADITIONAL VIEWS Up to the end of the nineteenth century, almost all in the international legal community agreed that the states belonging to the community of nations possessed a package of fundamental rights. These rights-equality, existence, external independence, self-defense, and territorial supremacy (sovereignty)—presumably belonged to any community recognized as a state. In part, the justification for such rights came from natural law. The underlying theory maintained that the rights represented legal principles on which all positive international law rested. This contention ignored the obvious fact that legal principles can only be created by a legal order and could not be presupposed by it. This controversy over jurisprudence forms one of the continuing controversies concerning the nature of international law as true law.
