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patria potestas

   Also found in: Legal, Wikipedia 0.07 sec.

patria potestas


(Latin; “power of the father”)

In Roman family law, the power that the male head of a family (paterfamilias) exercised over his descendants in the male line and over adopted children. Originally this power was absolute and included the power of life and death; a paterfamilias could acknowledge, banish, kill, or disown a child. He could free his male descendants from this obligation or turn over his daughter and all her inheritance to the power of her husband. By the end of the republic (from about the 1st century BC), a father could inflict only light punishment and his sons could keep what they earned.
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Note that the common law system was not an outgrowth of the doctrine of patria potestas that prevailed in pagan Rome.
When child-snatchers attack: the best way to keep children safe and ... by Grigg, William Norman / The New American
For example, discussing patria potestas, usually taken as a functioning social norm, Kuehn dwells on its varied and uncertain application in practice.
Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance ... by Chojnacki, Stanley / Renaissance Quarterly
In Roman culture this nearly absolute, coercive authority was called patria potestas, which in its range included the father's power of life and death over his children, beginning in infancy when a father chose to acknowledge and rear a child of "to expose" it, that is, throw the child away.
Who should be called father? Paul of Tarsus between the Jesus ... by Bartchy, S. Scott / Biblical Theology Bulletin
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