New Horizons in Spanish Colonial Law

Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has since the early 20th century been a vigorous subdiscipline of legal history. One of great figures in the field, the Argentinian legal historian Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, published in 1997 his Nuevos horizontes en el estudio historico del derecho indiano. The book, in which Tau addressed seminal methodological questions setting tone for the discipline's future orientation, proved to be the starting point for an important renewal of the discipline. Tau drew on the writings of legal historians, such as Paolo Grossi, Antonio Manuel Hespanha, and Bartolomé Clavero. Tau emphasized the development of legal history in connection to what he called "the posture superseding rational and statutory state law." The following features of normativity were now in need of increasing scholarly attention: the autonomy of different levels of social organization, the different modes of normative creativity, the many different notions of law and justice, the position of the jurist as an artifact of law, and the casuistic character of the legal decisions. Moreover, Tau highlighted certain areas of Spanish colonial law that he thought deserved more attention than they had hitherto received. One of these was the history of the learned jurist: the letrado was to be seen in his social, political, economic, and bureaucratic context. The Argentinian legal historian called for more scholarly works on book history, and he thought that provincial and local histories of Spanish colonial law had been studied too little. Within the field of historical science as a whole, these ideas may not have been revolutionary, but they contributed in an important way to bringing the study of Spanish colonial law up-to-date. It is beyond doubt that Tau's programmatic visions have been largely fulfilled in the past two decades. Equally manifest is, however, that new challenges to legal history and Spanish colonial law have emerged. The challenges of globalization are felt