BOOK REVIEW: Manuel BASTIAS SAAVEDRA on The Cambridge history of Latin American law in global perspective, edited by Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog, and A companion to Latin American legal history, edited by Matthew C. Mirow and Victor Uribe-Uran (Comparative Legal History XIII (2025) nr. 1, June, pp. 112-122)

(Image source: Taylor&Francis)

There has been an increasing interest in the legal history of Latin America in recent decades. Largely restricted to law faculties and considered to be the domain of legal scholars until the late twentieth century, since the early 2000s legal history has steadily become an established research field in the context of a wider historiography concerned with questions of colonialism and empire, race and status, slavery and labour, Indigenous peoples, nation and state-building, among others.

Many parallel developments can arguably account for this. One longer-term development has been the influence that prominent legal historians, such as Paolo Grossi, Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, Michael Stolleis, António Manuel Hespanha, and Bartolomé Clavero, have had in rejuvenating the field, not only through their works but mainly through their students and adherents, who have come to occupy positions in both history and law departments and have driven the emergence of a new legal history in the Latin American context. Another somewhat parallel development was the interest that social and ethnohistorians – mostly in Latin America and the United States of America – were taking to the use of judicial archives and sources, promoting what has been alternatively called sociolegal history and history of justice. Finally, a more recent development worth mentioning was the appointment in 2009 of Thomas Duve as director of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, which gave one of the world’s leading legal historical institutions a global historical agenda with regional focus on Latin America and encouraged both scholarly output and networking in the field.

The publication in 2024 of the two edited volumes that are the subject of this review can be seen as confirmation of this trend. But it also marks an inflection point in the historiography of law in Latin America, since what had been developing through the discrete accumulation of research across two decades has now become a field that is engaging in critical self-reflection about its objectives, methods, aims, and its future.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500187