United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It will, however, appear by recurring to Vattel when speaking of the right of "Postliminium," that slaves cannot be considered as a part of the booty which is alienated by the act of capture, and that they are to be ranked rather with real property, to the profits of which only the captors are entitled.
4 Sometimes, however, a family heir succeeds in this way to his parent, even though not in the latter's power at the time of his decease, as where a person returns from captivity after his father's death, this being the effect of the law of postliminium.
4 A blind man cannot make a will, except by observing the forms introduced by a law of our imperial father Justin. 5 A will made by a prisoner while in captivity with the enemy is invalid, even though he subsequently returns. One made, however, while he was in his own state is valid, if he returns, by the law of postliminium; if he dies in captivity it is valid by the lex Cornelia.
But if he dies in captivity the son is reckoned to have been independent from the moment of his father's capture. So too, if a son or a grandson is captured by the enemy, the power of his ascendant is provisionally suspended, though he may again be subjected to it by postliminium.
Thus postliminium means that the captive returns by the same threshold at which he was lost. A captive who is recovered after a victory over the enemy is deemed to have returned by postliminium. 6 Emancipation also liberates children from the power of the parent.
2 On the capture of a guardian by the enemy, the same statutes regulated the appointment of a substitute, who continued in office until the return of the captive; for if he returned, he recovered the guardianship by the law of postliminium.
But by our constitution the supreme dignity of the patriciate frees a son from power immediately on the receipt of the imperial patent; for who would allow anything so unreasonable as that, while a father is able by emancipation to release his son from the tie of his power, the imperial majesty should be unable to release from dependence on another the man whom it has selected as a father of the State? 5 Again, capture of the father by the enemy makes him a slave of the latter; but the status of his children is suspended by his right of subsequent restoration by postliminium; for on escape from captivity a man recovers all his former rights, and among them the right of paternal power over his children, the law of postliminium resting on a fiction that the captive has never been absent from the state.
It is probable to us, that the Popes, who had been originally transplanted from England to Ireland, had in the person of some cadet been re-transplanted to England; and that having in that way been disconnected from all personal recognition, and all local memorials of the capital house, by this sort of postliminium, the junior branch had ceased to cherish the honor of a descent which was now divided from all direct advantage.
This term is derived from 'limen' and 'post, which explains why we say that the person who has been captured by the enemy and has come back into our territories has returned by postliminium: for just as the threshold forms the boundary of a house, so the ancients represented the boundaries of the empire as a threshold; and this is also the origin of the term 'limes, signifying a kind of end and limit.
Word Of The Day