Justitium

{{italic title}} {{distinguish|Justitia (disambiguation)|Justinian (disambiguation)}} {{Short description| Suspension of normal civic business during an emergency}}

'''''Justitium''''' (derived from the Latin term ''Juris statio''<ref name=":0">{{cite book |title=A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Volume 1 |last1=Smith |first1=William |last2=Wayte |first2=William |last3=Marindin |first3=G.E. |publisher=John Murray |year=1890 |location=London |pages=1052}}</ref>) is a concept of Roman law, equivalent to the declaration of the state of emergency. Some scholars also refer to it as a state of exception,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Glanert |first1=Simone |last2=Girard |first2=Fabien |title=Law's Hermeneutics: Other Investigations |publisher=Routledge |location=Oxford |year=2017 |pages=196 |isbn=9781138123724}}</ref> stemming from a state of necessity.<ref name=":1">{{cite book |last1=Eraydin |first1=Ayda |last2=Frey |first2=Klaus |title=Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning: Theory and Practice |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Y0NvDwAAQBAJ&q=justitium+state+of+emergency&pg=PT72 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |date=2019 |isbn=9781351252867}}</ref> It involved the suspension of civil business, typically including the courts, the treasury and the Senate and was ordered by the Roman higher magistrates.<ref name=":0" /> It was usually declared following a sovereign's death, during the troubled period of ''interregnum'',{{cn|date=February 2023}} but also in case of invasions. However, in this last case, it was not as much the physical danger of invasion that justified the instauration of a state of exception, as the consequences that the news of the invasion had in Rome; for example, ''justitium'' was proclaimed at the news of Hannibal's attacks. The earliest recorded occasion of ''justitium'' being invoked was for the same reason, when in 465 BC panic gripped the city due to a mistaken belief of imminent invasion by the Aequi.

According to Giorgio Agamben, ''justitium'' progressively came to mean, after the Roman Republic, the public mourning of the sovereign: a sort of privatization or diversion of the danger threatening the ''polis'', as the sovereign claimed for himself the ''auctoritas'', or authority, necessary to the rule of law. In his conceptualization, it is a period where the law is indefinitely suspended without being abrogated for the purpose of generating an "anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law".<ref name=":1" />

==See also== {{portal|Philosophy}} * Martial law * Roman emergency decrees * Giorgio Agamben * ''Interregnum''

==References== <references /> * Giorgio Agamben, ''State of Exception'', 2005. * A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), William Smith * Livy, ''Ab urbe condita'', 3.3

==External links== * [https://web.archive.org/web/20120831060912/http://web.upmf-grenoble.fr/Haiti/Cours/Ak/ ''The Roman Law Library'' by Professor Yves Lassard and Alexandr Koptev]

Category:Emergency laws Category:Latin legal terminology Category:Philosophy of law Category:Concepts in political philosophy Category:Roman law