Jurisdictions of Everyday Life

In 1537, in Spain's School of Salamanca, the eminent Dominican Francisco De Vitoria composed a treatise concluding that the condition of indigenous peoples “cannot be considered under human law, but only under divine law in which the jurists are not sufficiently versed to be able to act on their own.” For Vitoria, the church should have priority over indigenous peoples because their status was not a civil but a theological question. In 1700, don Josef Caballero, contesting a demand for annulment by his wife in the ecclesiastical court of the Audiencia of Quito, demanded control over his wife's hacienda in the royal court. He argued that the royal court, rather than the ecclesiastical court, was the proper venue for determining his economic rights in this dispute. The stakes for each of these men were, of course, quite different, as were the audiences that they appealed to. Both men recognized, however, that key to their success would be to fix their claims to a specific jurisdictional status within the shifting terrain that characterized Spain's decentralized legal tradition. This paper argues that the combination of judicial power and negotiation provided the primary mediation of social life in the Spanish Empire. Royal cedulas, pleadings by communities, criminal trials, etc., share similar forms for establishing legitimacy, justifying insubordination, and recruiting support. Part of a larger project, this paper will focus specifically on criminal and notarial records to examine how this cultural logic structured relations of everyday life in the Judicial Empire.