An 1899 Law for AI and Space: The Martens Clause

An 1899 Law for AI and Space: The Martens Clause

From Thinking On Paper by Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson

April 7, 2026 · 28 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the Martens Clause and its relevance to modern governance of emerging technologies.

For 100,000 years, peace didn’t exist. And soon we’ll have AGI and cities on the moon and expect everyone to get along. The first conference on not killing each other wasn’t until 1899. What the hell were we doing before that? Why did it take humanity so long to sit down and speak about peace? That’s a question for another podcast. For this, let’s rewind the clock and have a story. The Martens Clause was a legal principle drafted by Russian-Imperial diplomat Fyodor Martens during the first Hague Peace Conference of 1899. It established that even in the absence of specific written law, nations and individuals remain bound by "the laws of humanity and the requirements of public conscience." In short, don’t be an asshole. Originally conceived as a compromise to prevent the collapse of early international humanitarian law negotiations - when smaller nations like Belgium objected to being smaller nations - the clause became a foundational backstop in international law. It was subsequently invoked in some of the most consequential legal proceedings of the twentieth century, including the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, the 1949 Corfu Channel dispute and the 1986 ICJ ruling against the…

People in this episode

Hosts: Mark Fielding, Jeremy Gilbertson

Topics covered

  • international law
  • humanitarian law
  • peace
  • emerging technologies
  • AGI
  • Martens Clause

Keywords

  • Martens Clause
  • international law
  • peace conference
  • AGI
  • humanity
  • Nuremberg Trials
  • emerging technologies

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Belgium, Nicaragua

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