This volume examines the lives of more than thirty-five key personalities in Latin American law with a focus on how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law in their countries and the region.
The book is a significant contribution to our ability to understand the work and perspectives of jurists and their effect on legal development in Latin America. The individuals selected for study exhibit wide-ranging areas of expertise from private law and codification, through national public law and constitutional law, to international developments that left their mark on the region and the world. The chapters discuss the jurists within their historical, intellectual, and political context. The editors selected jurists after extensive consultation with legal historians in various countries of the region looking at the jurist’s particular merits, contributions to law in general, religious perspective, and importance within the specific country and period under consideration. Giving the work a diversity of international and methodological perspectives, the chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars and historians from Latin America and around the world.
The collection will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between law and religion. Political, social, legal, and religious historians among other readers will find, for the first time in English, authoritative treatments of the region’s essential legal thinkers and authors. Students and other who may not read Spanish will appreciate these clear, accessible, and engaging English studies of the region’s great jurists.
Q. Why this book, and why now?
For over 15 years as a legal historian, I have been interested in the way individual experience, viewpoints, perspective, and beliefs shape legal change. In the Latin American context, I have explored the way personal and religious beliefs impacted the work of some of the region’s most important drafters of codes. Three or four years ago, Rafael Domingo at Emory Law School reached out to me about co-editing a volume on the relationship between individual faith and law in Latin America as part of a larger project on law and Christianity throughout the world. I had already written on jurists in which I was interested for the volume on French jurists (Léon Duguit) and on Spanish jurists (Juan Solorzano Pereira). I was excited to help with the volume on Latin America, and Rafael and I worked well together to identify over 35 jurists from the region for whom their Christian faith influenced their work in law. Ever since my book Latin American Constitution, I had wanted to write on the Cuban priest Felix Varela who was one of America’s first professors of constitutional law. I decided that this would be the chapter I contributed to the larger volume.
Q. Who should read this book?
This book is for legal historians, historians of religion, and Latin Americanists. Like the other books in the larger series, it points out the influence of faith in legal actors and their approach to law.
Q. What is the most important takeaway you hope your readers gain from this book?
For many of the jurists, lawyers, law teachers, and drafters covered in this volume, this is the first scholarly presentation of their life and work in the law in English. I hope English readers gain an appreciation of the variety of approaches to faith and law in the region and of the high level of sophistication, learning, and international understanding of these important jurists.
Q. How did you decide on the title and cover art?
The title is descriptive and fits with the other volumes in the larger series; the cover art was suggested by the publisher.
M.C. Mirow is a founding faculty member of the College of Law and a member of the Florida bar. In 2019, he was elected a Vocal (Executive Committee member) of the Instituto Internacional de Historia del Derecho Indiano and a Corresponding Member of the Legal History section of the Academia Nacional de Historia (Argentina). The same year, he served as Chair of the award committee for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History and a Visiting Professor at the University of Lille (France) and the Universidad del Salvador (Argentina). In 2016, he was a MacCormick Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Law School, and in 2014, he received a Golden Quill Award from the Florida Historical Society. He has previously served as a Fulbright U.S. Visiting Scholar in Chile, a Mentschikoff Fellow at the University of Miami, and a Kelley Lecturer at Davidson College. Mirow is on the Board of Editors of the Law and History Review and serves as a co-editor of the series the Legal History Library (Brill/Nijhoff). He is a Corresponding Member of the Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho in Buenos Aires.