Captured Enemy Property: Booty of War and Seized Enemy Property

In an address before the 1949 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law this writer remarked that the laws governing captured enemy property have never been codified or collected in one place and are very difficult to find and apply. The lack of a handy tool in the field of captured property has been noted at times by others, including Professor H. A. Smith, formerly a colonel with the British 21st Army Group, who observed that the “law of booty is almost unwritten” and Judge Manley O. Hudson, who wrote some years ago in an editorial in this JOURNAL that the “literature on captured property and war booty seemed inadequate.”