Patria Potestas
idea · 4 works · 18 mentions · 32 anchored passages
paternal power · patria potestas · Paternal Power · patriarchal power · Patriarchal Power · Paternal authority · agnatic relationship · family bondage · father's power · in potestate patris
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
The patriarchal power of the father over children in Roman law, which impeded full recognition of individual rights but was gradually lessened.
It was impeded by the Patria Potestas—the life-long power of the father over the son.
Coemptione autem facta mulieres omni modo potestate parentis liberantur.
et in filio quidem, si in adoptionem datur, tres mancipationes et duae, &c.
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The Roman legal concept of paternal power invoked to describe Gallic household authority.
He, a Roman, familiar with a Patria Potestas as yet undecayed, thinks it worthy of remark that the head of a Gallic household had the power of life and death over his wives as well as his children, and notices with astonishment that, when a husband died under suspicious circumstances, his wives were treated with the same cruelty as a body of household slaves at Rome whose master had been killed by an unknown hand.
It seems to me to be founded on the order of emancipation from Paternal authority.
The Patria Potestas seems to me the most probable source of a well-known English custom which has occasioned no little surprise to students of our law.
Ancient Law
The life-long paternal authority of a Roman father over his descendants' person and property.
The Patria Potestas of the Romans, which is necessarily our type of the primeval paternal authority, is equally difficult to understand as an institution of civilized life, whether we consider its incidence on the person or its effects on property.
On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father or other ancestor over the person and property of his descendants, an authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas.
If we begin with the marriage of father and mother, Cognation will only express the relationship of brothers and sisters;
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The legal concept of paternal power, invoked comparatively across Irish and Hindu custom.
It is expressly laid down that it created the same Patria Potestas as actual paternity;
The Patria Potestas, which is witnessed to by the ancient law or custom of so many communities, was founded on power quite as much as on parentage;
Now the recognition of agnatic relationship is good evidence that patriarchal power either exists or has once existed in a community;