Origin 19th century
Terra nullius is a Latin term meaning nobody's land, used since the nineteenth century in international law for the principle that territory belonging to no recognized sovereign state could be acquired through occupation. European colonial powers invoked the doctrine to claim sovereignty over inhabited territories by treating them as empty or unowned despite existing indigenous populations, and historians debate how far back before the 1800s the concept genuinely applied. Its use to justify claims over inhabited land has since been rejected, most visibly in the 1992 Australian case Mabo v Queensland, in which the High Court declared terra nullius a legal fiction and recognized indigenous land rights. Today Antarctica is the main landmass sometimes described as terra nullius, while smaller disputed areas such as Bir Tawil and stretches of the Croatia-Serbia border arise from unresolved border disputes rather than genuine non-occupation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Origin Period Core PrincipleTerritory not under the sovereignty of any state can be acquired through occupation. 1 Origin Period
Origin Period (category)19th Century (1800-1899) 1 Classification
Doctrine Category Connections
In Area Of Law
Entity-backed identity for the doctrine category value this doctrine already carries as an enum fact, resolved to a doctrine entity by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The enum fact itself stays on the entity unchanged.
Long-Form Articles
Sources
1. Terra nullius (Wikipedia)
History
Since the nineteenth century, it has been used in international law to refer to the principle by which territories deemed not to belong to any recognised sovereign state could be acquired through occupation.
Doctrine
In international law, the classical doctrine of terra nullius holds that territory can be acquired through occupation if it is not under the sovereignty of any state.
View the Source2. Wikipedia: Terra nullius
used in international law to refer to the principle by which territories deemed not to belong to any recognised sovereign state could be acquired through occupationView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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