Definition
A Latin verb from medieval and legal Latin meaning "to make war" or "to wage war." Derived from *bellum* (war), *bellare* appears in treatises on the law of nations and natural law as a technical term denoting the act of commencing or conducting warfare. Its primary use in legal literature is in the framing of philosophical and juridical questions about the legitimacy of armed conflict — most notably, whether the waging of war can ever be legally or morally justified.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *bellare* will find it almost exclusively in early modern and classical sources on the law of nations (*ius gentium*) and natural law theory, rather than in domestic legal texts. The term signals that a source is engaging with foundational questions of international law, particularly the doctrine of just war (*bellum iustum*). Because *bellare* is a verb form rather than a noun, it tends to appear in discursive, often rhetorical constructions — interrogative clauses posing the question of war's justness — rather than in operative legal provisions or definitions.
The primary trap for corpus researchers is mistaking *bellare* for a term with domestic legal significance. It carries no application in common law pleading, property, or procedure. Its natural habitat is the philosophical-legal literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, and their contemporaries. Searches that surface *bellare* are effectively pointing toward the natural law and law of nations shelf of the corpus, not toward case law or statutes.
Note also that Burrill cross-references *bellum* as the parent noun. Any research path beginning with *bellare* should migrate quickly to *bellum* for the fuller doctrinal development of war as a legal concept in historical sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry for this term. Burrill defines it concisely as "[t]o war; to make war" and situates it squarely in the law of nations, citing Grotius's *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* (Book I, Chapter 2) — specifically the question *An bellare unquam justum sit* ("whether it is ever right to make war"). This citation is genuine and traceable: it corresponds to Grotius's foundational treatment of just war doctrine in the opening chapters of *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* (1625), the seminal text of early international law.
Burrill's entry does exactly what it should for a Latin verb of this kind: it defines minimally, gives the grammatical derivation, places the term in its field of law, and illustrates with a representative quotation. No other standard historical law dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's) appear to carry this entry, which reflects *bellare*'s narrow scholarly register. Its absence from those sources is itself informative — the term was recognized as belonging to the learned law-of-nations tradition rather than to the practitioner's common law vocabulary.