Max Kuhelj Bugaric, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government and a student in the Law School at Harvard University, has posted Raphael Fulgosius on Just War: Papal Adjudication of Conflicts and War as Judgment. The paper was awarded the 2025 Irving Oberman Memorial Award in Legal History of the Harvard Law School.
While Raphael Fulgosius (1367–1427) does advance a seemingly revolutionary notion—that in certain cases, the outcome of a war is itself a just verdict—it must be read in light of the overall framework he develops. But in what has been written on this topic, the emphasis rests almost entirely on his argument about the impossibility of judging the different sides’ claims to justice in a formal bellum. This paper attempts to correct the historical record and offer a more fully contextual interpretation of his claims. Fulgosius was willing to set aside the rigid theory of the just war framework and instead label conflicts between Christians “dissensions” (dissensiones) precisely in order to preserve the diplomatic power of the papacy. But the conclusion Fulgosius reaches in effect allows for an even stronger statement of the unilateral rights of war, as it is the pope himself who acts as judge in such disputes. There can be no appeal to his sentence, which also resolves the problem of potential ambiguity and doubt. Even if he thought papal adjudicative power should not be completely unconstrained in such scenarios, he likely would have wanted to preserve the general prerogative, motivated at least in part by the desire to rein in the constant warfare that characterized the Italian city-states in this period.
--Dan Ernst