Norms beyond Empire

Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing local normative production. Its ten chapters explore normative production by focusing on case studies from the Iberian empires in China, India, Japan, and the Philippines. ; Readership: All interested in legal history, the history of Christianity in Asia, the history of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism, early modern colonialism, missionary history, global history, and legal pluralism

Norms beyond Empire

Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing local normative production. Its ten chapters explore normative production by focusing on case studies from the Iberian empires in China, India, Japan, and the Philippines. ; Readership: All interested in legal history, the history of Christianity in Asia, the history of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism, early modern colonialism, missionary history, global history, and legal pluralism

A construção das diferenças no constitucionalismo chileno (1810-1980)

O artigo busca analisar a construção das diferenças no constitucionalismo chileno a partir da problemática relação entre direito e diversidade. Parte-se das tensões entre diferentes formas de observação social da diversidade para repensar o problema da alteridade nas constituições chilenas de 1810 a 1980. Sob essa perspectiva, a evolução histórica da constituição pode ser vista, além de suas reivindicações de igualdade formal, como um processo contínuo de construção de diferenças legais. Focalizando nas diferenças construídas através da história constitucional chilena, pode-se repensar a transição do ancien régime para o constitucionalismo moderno não como um processo orientado pela igualdade, mas sim como a construção e o desdobramento de novas diferenças. A história constitucional mostra que os modelos legais não produziram uma equalização par tout da população. Ao invés disso, a igualdade e a diferença foram reconstruídas e adaptadas às sociedades que emergiram da dissolução da ordem do ancien régime

Jurisdictional Autonomy and the Autonomy of Law: End of Empire and the Functional Differentiation of Law in 19th-century Latin America

This contribution discusses the collapse of the Iberian Empire and the transformation of legal regimes in 19th-century Latin America. While most of the literature on this period centers on the process of state-building and the reform of legal institutions, my discussion will focus on the important changes produced in the form of law according to Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation. The main argument is that systems theory can provide a re-evaluation of the history of law in the 19th and 20th centuries if one focuses on the idea of the autonomy of law. I argue that this way of reading the functioning of law is analogous to the legal historical re-evaluation of early-modern Iberian legal regimes through the idea of jurisdictional autonomy. Taken together both ways of understanding autonomy in legal observation direct our attention to shifts in law that go beyond the question of empire and nation-state building

the Latin-American social question in the Latin-American scientific congresses (1898-1908)

This article focuses on the circulation of ideas on social policies in Latin America through the discussions in the Latin-American scientific congresses. The main argument is that, although Latin-American scholars relied on European narratives to frame the social problems that affected the region, the policy solutions they found were not based on the direct importation of foreign models. Either by emphasising criminality or the need for social reform, scholars sought to address the social question through regional mechanisms which were the outgrowth of regional processes of knowledge transfe

The Portuguese Empire and the Deep Roots of Goan Society

Recension of Ângela Barreto Xavier, Religion and Empire in Portuguese India. Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa, Albany (NY): State University of New York Press 2022, XVIII + 407 p., ISBN 978-1-4384-8911-

Nature, Bodies, and Land: Reframing Ownership and Property in Early Modern Spanish America

Rooted in medieval juridical thinking, early modern legal culture saw commu- nity’s law as the expression of an underlying order of things, something defined not by the willing agreement of the parts that constituted the community, but rather by nature and nurture. For the Iberian world, this belief was expressed in the idea of the ‘señorío natural’, which according to legal doctrine was a bond that linked subjects to the land where they were born and subjected them to a common jurisdiction (Hespanha, Uncommon Laws ). Communities and all kinds of corpo- rate bodies thus also had a natural origin, which points to an intertwinement, and not a contradiction, between nature and different kinds of collective bodies. These bodies—corporations, guilds, communities, families, and so on—were the basis for the assignment of rights, obligations, privileges, and duties, but also for the dis- tribution of access to land. This article seeks to reframe ownership and property within this framework as a way of rethinking the ways in which communities defined their relations to land