Postliminium

Reprisal; recovery; recapture; postliminy. The restoration or return of a person or thing to a former right, estate, or condition; a fiction of the civil law by which persons or things captured by the enemy, on coming again into the power of the nation to which they formerly belonged, are restored to their former state. The principle is recognized by the law of nations, but is not applied to movable property, unless the recapture is immediate. A merchant vessel captured at sea, during war, by an enemy ship, becomes the (qualified) property of her captors, by the law of prize. If, however, before the captors succeed in taking her in for adjudication, she is recaptured by a ship of the nation to which she belongs, she does not become prize to the recapturing ship, but, under the doctrine of postliminy, the title of her original owners revives, and she must be surrendered to them. Jus postliminii is a right to restitution after a recapture, as applied in maritime law, — a use of the phrase which is derived from the Roman jus postliminii, which restored the citizen of Rome who had been made a slave to his threshold, i.e. to his franchise. The term is therefore metaphorically used in our admiralty courts to signify a resumption of an original inherent right to a recaptured British ship in the legal owners. But the phrase is also frequently used with an analogous meaning in other branches of the law. Brown. Postliminium fingit eum qui captus est in civitate semper fuisse. Postliminy supposes that he who was taken prisoner had always been in the state.

See Postliminium.