terra nullius

From Latin terra nūllīus (“nobody's land”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈtɛɹə nʌˈlaɪ.əs/

terra nullius (countable and uncountable, plural terrae nullius)

1. (international law) Empty land; land not legally belonging to anyone; no man's land.
   • 1993, Patrick Dodson, ‘Welcome Speech to Conference on the Position of Indigenous People in National Constitutions’, in Heiss & Minter, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, Allen & Unwin 2008, p. 146:

     When Aboriginal people showed up which they inevitably did they had to be subjected, incarcerated or eradicated: to keep the myth of terra nullius alive.

   • 2015 May 24, Agence France-Presse, “Kingdom of Enclava: new micro-nation settles for spot on Croat-Serb border”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Following the breakup of former Yugoslavia in 1991, seven new states emerged in the region with many border disputes that left some territories as terrae nullius, or no-man’s lands.

   • 2017, Jamie Bartlett, chapter 8, in Radicals, William Heinemann, →ISBN:

     This overgrown and unremarkable little swamp is terra nullius. Under vaguely defined and loosely enforced international law, the first person who claims sovereignty over terra nullius can have it.

• res nullius

• terra nullius on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈtɛr.ra nuːlˈliː.ʊs]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈt̪ɛr.ra nulˈliː.us]

terra nūllīus f (genitive terrae nūllīus); first declension

1. (New Latin, international law) Empty land; land not legally belonging to anyone; no man's land.

First-declension noun with an indeclinable portion.