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.
Q. Why this book, and why now?
This book provides an authoritative summary of the vast field of Latin American legal history from the perspective of over 20 different authors, each experts in their topics. While there have been individual monographs that have attempted to capture the broad sweep of the field, such as my Latin American Law published in 2004, a new compendium from scholars around the world seemed like a good idea. I was pleased that Brill reached out to me to lead the effort, and I immediately thought of Victor Uribe in FIU’s history department as the best possible co-editor for the volume. We have different academic formations, perspectives, and approaches to the topic, and we each know different groups of scholars working in the field. Working with Victor on this volume was really a treat for me. I have admired his scholarship for decades, and he helped recruit me to FIU in 2002 as part of the College of Law’s founding faculty. As his students know, Victor is precise, demanding, and deeply thoughtful. He also has a laugh and take on the world and scholarship that made the whole thing just a lot of fun. I am lucky to have him as a friend, colleage, co-editor, and co-author.
In sum, the 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. So, it seeks to be a pretty comprehensive work that reveals the state of the field and its current debates.
Q. Who should read this book?
I think this book 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. This is an academic book, and the audience is graduate students, professors of law, historians, and anyone interested in the legal history of the region. This could include policy makers, judges, and lawyers.
Q. What is the most important takeaway you hope your readers gain from this book?
I don’t think it is a work with any particular takeaway. I hope that readers, and especially users, of the book will be impressed by the variety of work being done in Latin American legal history throughout the world. Because the book is in English, it will open the field to many for whom the languages of Latin America make this more difficult.
There are two chapters on pre-contact law and a greater focus on Indigenous law throughout the work. I think this is an important contribution. Authors of each chapter were encouraged to cite the most important works in the current scholarly debates associated with their topics, and I think these bibliographical entries will make it a useful work for scholars for decades.
My family and I spent a lot of time preparing the index, something that is often given short shrift even in works that aspire to comprehensive coverage. I am proud of the index because it provides paths into all the excellent contributions in the volume. Angela Mirow, my wife, helped tremendously with the index and other mechanical aspects of the getting the book ready for publication.
Q. How did you decide on the title and cover art?
The title was suggested by the publisher, Brill. It is a rather straight-forward title that describes the content of the volume. Admittedly, it is not thrilling, but it should get the right readers to the book.
The cover art is special to me. It is a painting by my father Gregory Mirow who was a teacher of painting and a commercial artist for most of his career. In retirement, he paints what he wants to, and will not suffer suggestions from even members of our family. It is his activity. Nonetheless, when I returned from teaching as a Fulbright Professor in Chile, he flipped though images of the houses on the hills of Valparaiso, Chile. The cover is his oil painting Valparaiso II (2010). I think it is a remarkable painting, and when the artist is your father it can be easy to negotiate the intellectual property rights. You just have to say, “sign here, Dad.”
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.