John Bassett Moore (December 3, 1860 – November 12, 1947) was an American lawyer and authority on international law. Moore was a State Department official, a professor at Columbia University, and a judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice from 1922 to 1928, the first American judge to sit on that judicial body.
After the close of the war with Spain was secretary and council to the American Peace Commission at Paris.
He was on the Hague Tribunal from 1912
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."
Legacy and awards
thumb|John Bassett Moore postage stamp
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.
In 1927, Moore was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal.
Works
- Reports on Extraterritorial Crime (1887)
- Extradition and Interstate Rendition (two volumes, 1891)
- American Notes on the Conflict of Laws (1896)
- History and Digest of International Arbitrations (6 vols., 1898)
- American Diplomacy (1905)
- Digest of International Law (8 vols., 1906)
- Works of James Buchanan (12 vols., 1909–1911, reissued 1960)
- Four Phases of American Development (1912)
- International Law and Some Current Illusions (1924)
- The Permanent Court of International Justice (1924)
- International Adjudications, Ancient and Modern (8 vols., 1937)
- Collected Papers (7 vols., 1945)