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 both in the historical and
legal sciences and not the least in the field of legal history. They have also brought major
topics (back) on to the scene such as the importance of religious normativity within the
normative setting of societies. These challenges have made scholars aware of the necessity to
reconstruct the circulation of ideas juridical practices and researchers are becoming more
attentive to the intense cultural translation involved in the movement of legal ideas and
institutions from one context to another. Not least the growing consciousness and strong
claims to reconsider colonial history from the premises of postcolonial scholarship expose the
discipline to an unseen necessity of reconsidering its very foundational concepts. What concept
of law do we need for our historical studies when considering multi-normative settings? How do
we define the spatial dimension of our work? How do we analyze the entanglements in legal
history? Until recently Spanish colonial law attracted little interest from non-Hispanic
scholars and its results were not seen within a larger global context. In this respect
Spanish colonial law was hardly different from research done on legal history of the European
continent or common law. Spanish colonial law has however recently become a topic of interest
beyond the Hispanic world. The field is now increasingly seen in the context of global legal
history while the old and the new research results are often put into a comparative context of
both European law of the early Modern Period and other colonial legal orders. In this volume
scholars from different parts of the Western world approach Spanish colonial law from the new
perspectives of contemporary legal historical research.
