A Companion to Latin American Legal History

This comprehensive volume offers fresh insights on Latin American and Caribbean law before European contact, during the colonial and early republican eras and up to the present. It considers the history of legal education, the legal profession, Indigenous legal history, and the legal history concerning Africans and African Americans, other enslaved peoples, women, immigrants, peasants, and workers. This book also examines the various legal frameworks concerning land and other property, commerce and business, labor, crime, marriage, family and domestic conflicts, the church, the welfare state, constitutional law and rights, and legal pluralism. It serves as a current introduction for those new to the field and provides in-depth interpretations, discussions, and bibliographies for those already familiar with the region’s legal history.

Contributors are: Diego Acosta, Alejandro Agüero, Sarah C. Chambers, Robert J. Cottrol, Oscar Cruz Barney, Mariana Dias Paes, Tamar Herzog, Marta Lorente Sariñena, M.C. Mirow, Jerome G. Offner, Brian Owensby, Juan Manuel Palacio, Agustín Parise, Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, Heikki Pihlajamäki, Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, Timo H. Schaefer, William Suárez-Potts, Victor M. Uribe-Uran, Cristián Villalonga, Alex Wisnoski, and Eduardo Zimmermann.

M.C. Mirow, Ph.D. (1993), Cambridge University, Dr.jur. (2003), Leiden University, is Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law. He is the author of Latin American Law and Latin American Constitutions.

Victor M. Uribe-Uran, Ph.D. (1993), University of Pittsburgh, is Professor of History and Law at Florida International University. He has authored, edited, or co-edited four books including Fatal Love: Spousal Murders, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford, 2016), and around one hundred articles, chapters, and reviews.