Justitium (derived from the Latin term Juris statio[1]) is a concept of Roman law, equivalent to the declaration of the state of emergency.
[3] It involved the suspension of civil business, typically including the courts, the treasury and the Senate and was ordered by the Roman higher magistrates.
[1] It was usually declared following a sovereign's death, during the troubled period of interregnum,[citation needed] but also in case of invasions.
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.