Who's a Pirate?

Interesting piece at WSJ, "Who's a Pirate? In Court, A Duel Over Definitions." And I learned something right away. Captain Edward Teach was Blackbeard, and William Teach at Pirate's Cove isn't a Teach at all.

Anyway, read WSJ's essay. We do have modern-day pirate problems:

Prosecuting pirates, rather than hanging them from the yardarm, is the modern world's approach to the scourge of Somali piracy that has turned huge swathes of the Indian Ocean into a no-go zone for commercial vessels.

But there's a problem: Some 2,000 years after Cicero defined pirates as the "common enemy of all," nobody seems able to say, legally, exactly what a pirate is.

U.S. law long ago made piracy a crime but didn't define it. International law contains differing, even contradictory, definitions. The confusion threatens to hamstring U.S. efforts to crack down on modern-day Blackbeards.

The central issue in Norfolk: If you try to waylay and rob a ship at sea—but you don't succeed—are you still a pirate?

It may seem strange there should be doubt about an offense as old as this one. Piracy was the world's first crime with universal jurisdiction, meaning that any country had the right to apprehend pirates on the high seas

And by the way, international relations scholars are on the case. See Bridget Coggins, "The Pirate Den."