Roman law and other ancient land systems generally granted all rights in
airspace to the owner of the underlying land. The first law specifically applicable to aircraft was a local ordinance enacted in
Paris in 1784, one year after the first
hot air balloon flight by the
Montgolfier brothers. Several court cases involving balloonists were tried in common law jurisdictions during the 19th century.
Development of public international law Balloons were used in the
Franco-German War of 1870–71, and the
First Hague Conference of 1899 set a five-year moratorium on the use of balloons in combat operations, which was not renewed by the Second Hague Conference (1907). Prior to
World War I, several nations signed bilateral agreements regarding the legal status of international flights, and during the war, several nations took the step of prohibiting flights over their territory. Several competing multilateral treaty regimes were established in the wake of the war, including the
Paris Convention of 1919, Ibero-American Convention (1926) and the Havana Convention (1928). The
International Air Transport Association (IATA) was founded in 1919 in a conference at
The Hague, to foster cooperation between airlines in various commercial and legal areas.
Japan Japan enacted a legal regime governing civil aviation in 1952, after a brief moratorium during the
occupation that followed World War II. While the early domestic air travel market was lightly regulated and highly competitive, the government implemented a regulation system in 1970 which limited service to three carriers (
Japan Airlines,
All Nippon Airways and
Japan Air System), with largely separate markets and strictly regulated fare levels that minimized competition. Pressure from the United States, which sought to introduce new U.S. carriers to the transpacific market in the 1980s, led Japan to gradually deregulate its market in the form of cheap packaged-tour fares and an increased international role for ANA in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by the advent of new domestic carriers such as
Skymark Airlines and
Air Do. ==Notable aviation lawyers==