Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (review)

This collection of essays is the latest publication to emerge from the annual workshop on nineteenth-century history sponsored by the University of London's Institute of Latin American Studies. As the volume's editor, Eduardo Zimmermann, explains in the introduction, the six essays in the book explore judicial concepts, practices, and institutions, centerpieces of debate and conflict during the transition from colony to nation-state in Latin America. Charles R. Cutter frames a set of key issues for a better understanding of this transition with his essay on Spanish America's legal culture on the eve of Independence. Of central importance to this culture was the adaptability of judicial standards and practices to local circumstances, which weighed heavily upon subsequent generations intent on calibrating more precisely legal statutes and judicial practices in independent Spanish America.

Three essays explore the tensions evident in the search to reconcile colonial precedent, new logics of legitimacy, and social realities in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Linda Arnold focuses on the fuero militar in Mexico. Arnold disputes the contention that the military court system functioned after Independence as a corrupt entity that allowed a privileged elite to act with impunity against civil society. Instead, she asserts that, in the context of a violent, amorphous public culture, numerous and disparate actors resorted to the military justice system to seek legitimate redress within the constraints of a corporatist logic. Thomas H. Holloway examines the brief time during which Rio de Janeiro experimented with a system of locally elected justices of the peace. The system, beloved by liberals and codified in the 1824 Constitution, died within two decades. In 1841, pragmatic political leaders, fearful of slaves and the free poor, opted to return to a highly centralized criminal justice system, reversing the glimmers of liberal hopefulness. Osvaldo Barreneche analyzes the evolution of penal discourse and the adaptation of colonial precedent to early nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Barreneche notes that many colonial laws stayed on the books well into the nineteenth century, while liberal principles, such as due process and defendants' rights, joined them. On balance, however, as lawmakers struggled over practical and effective solutions to the ongoing crisis of political instability, an emphasis on social control outweighed the commitment to liberal theory.

Two essays explore the nature of legal training and practice. Victor M. Uribe compares the role of lawyers in the colonial and post-colonial states throughout Spanish America. Uribe argues that, to a large degree, the Spanish crown generated a myth that the American dominions suffered an overabundance of lawyers as part of its efforts to curtail the increasingly prominent place of lawyers in a critical public sphere. Indeed, crown hostility, followed by the disruptions of the Independence Wars, created a shortage of professionals with legal training in the newly independent states. Attempts to redress this shortage contributed to a subsequent increase in the size of the liberal middle sectors, whose members called for additional political reform later in the nineteenth century. In the volume's last essay, Eduardo Zimmermann describes the education of lawyers and judges during the period of "national organization" in Argentina (ca. 1860-1880). Zimmermann addresses primarily the relationship between the nature of legal training in both civil and constitutional law in Argentina's university system and the world of politics in the post-Rosas era.

This book suffers from a number of problems commonly faced by collections of this kind. Most importantly, there is a lack of regional and chronological balance among the essays. The absence of a concluding essay or more synthetic introduction also diminishes the value of the book for the non-specialist. However, the quality of the essays in general is high. Together, they lead to a better appreciation for the myriad ways in which decisions about judicial structures and practices at the local and regional level were driven by tensions among ideological, social, and...