Decisive role of Roman Law in development of International Law

Abstract

Abstract –Roman Law has been generally conceived by legal academia as a system of private law, which mainly deals with contact, marriage and property. Though it has been not much widely discussed Justinian’s “Corpus Juris” contains a good deal of Roman Public Law. The usage of this legal treatise was confined to Roman Empire and it was faded into oblivion by the decline of Rome in 5th century A.D. The research problem of this research primarily deals with the fact that how Roman Law caused to create the pillars of International Law in the West and it further examines how Romans practiced customs with foreign nations and how those customs turned into be legal norms in coming years by making impacts to the development of International Law. The term Jus Gentium in Roman Law had a different meaning in practice. It designed primarily for the litigation among foreigners and in addition to that it was included rules of International Law such as sanctity of envoys or the captor’s right to war booty. In the post Roman era famous Jesuit scholar in Law Francesco Suarez (1548-1617) was the first modern jurist to apply “Jus Gentium “as International Law. Apart from that when Grotius developed the international law in 17th century his works were mainly influenced by Roman legal thinking. For instance the concepts of jus ad bellum and jus in bellum (Right to War) were developed under the thread of Roman notion of bellum justum (Just War). The doctrinal approach will be applied to the assessment of this research on the basis of Roman legal texts and historiography. At the end of this work reader will get a clear understanding of how the modern roots of International Law were shaped through the annals of Roman juridical contribution.