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International Law-Extraterritorial Criminal Jurisdiction

Michigan Law Review

The importance of assertions of the right to punish extraterritorial crime is directly related to the advance of international commercial and social intercourse. The earliest serious attempts to assert such a jurisdiction date only from the eighteenth century. Now, practically every state exercises some degree of jurisdiction over offenses committed abroad. But the extent of the power claimed by the different nations varies so as to cause doubt as to what is the international rule on the subject.