I am much obliged by the kind present you have made us of your edition of Vattel. It came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising State make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations. Accordingly, that copy which I kept (after depositing one in our own public library here, and sending the other to the College of Massachusetts Bay, as you directed) has been continually in the hands of the members of our Congress now sitting, who are much pleased with your notes and preface, and have entertained a high and just esteem for their author. Your manuscript "Idée sur le Gouvernement et la Royauté," is also well relished, and may, in time, have its effect. I thank you, likewise, for the other smaller pieces which accompanied Vattel. "Le court Exposé de ce qui est passé entre la Cour Britanique et les Colonies," etc., being a very concise and clear statement of facts, will be reprinted here for the use of our new friends in Canada.http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28dc00211%29%29
Franklin clearly refers to Vattel's "Law of Nations" legal treatise in all lower case, YET, Vattel's other book is capitalized.
Therefore, an argument from the above letter can be made that "law of nations" clearly equals "Law of Nations" = Vattel.
The point here, is that I'm saying it's a possibility that the framers were referring to Vattel's "Law of Nations" in the Constitution....while you are saying that it's 100%, impossible they are while offering up only your opinion for proof of that absolute even after you've been proven clearly wrong on at least one account (re: "Look at any article of the constitution-- all the nouns are capitalized" in post #23).
"New students of the Constitution often see one more thing that raises eyebrows: the use of capital letters in the original text. Some have even gone so far as to say that capitalized words in the original Constitution have some sort of special significance above and beyond the non-capitalized words. This is only true in that most of the non-standard capitalization is done to nouns. Again, this was an issue of style, and is similar to the way German capitalizes nouns — they are simply capitalized, and that's all. The words "People" and "State" have the exact same significance and meaning as "people" and "state". Many modern transcriptions of the Constitution remove this extra capitalization without changing the meaning of the document."
The phrase "law of nations" was the 18th century phrase for what we today call "international law." Vattel was one writer on international law, and was certainly influential on the Founders on that topic. On issues of domestic law, common law writers such as Coke and Blackstone were far more influential.