Law And Christianity In Latin America

This volume examines the lives of more than thirty-five key personalities in Latin American law with a focus on how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law in their countries and the region. The book is a significant contribution to our ability to understand the work and perspectives of jurists and their effect on legal development in Latin America. The individuals selected for study exhibit wide-ranging areas of expertise from private law and codification, through national public law and constitutional law, to international developments that left their mark on the region and the world. The chapters discuss the jurists within their historical, intellectual, and political context. The editors selected jurists after extensive consultation with legal historians in various countries of the region looking at the jurist’s particular merits, contributions to law in general, religious perspective, and importance within the specific country and period under consideration. Giving the work a diversity of international and methodological perspectives, the chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars and historians from Latin America and around the world. The collection will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between law and religion. Political, social, legal, and religious historians among other readers will find, for the first time in English, authoritative treatments of the region’s essential legal thinkers and authors. Students and other who may not read Spanish will appreciate these clear, accessible, and engaging English studies of the region’s great jurists.

This book makes a valuable contribution to the fascinating global debate on the meaning and scope of freedom of religion or belief and the relations between state, society and religion. It offers a cross-thematic approach to law and religion from the Global South. Law and religion have been consolidated to form a specific area of study in recent years. However, due to language barriers, most of the regional and national debates within Latin America have not been accessible to interested audiences from other parts of the world. Despite the specificities of the Latin American context, the issues, arrangements and processes that have been negotiated and developed in this part of the Global South make a valuable contribution to addressing the challenges that have arisen in other regions. The book analyses the intersections and interactions between religion and other far-reaching subjects such as politics and democracy, traditional cultures, national and ethnic groups, majorities and minorities, public education, management of diversity, intolerance and violence, as well as secularism and equality. The collection of essays is of interest not only to legal scholars and practitioners, but also to sociologists, political scientists and theologians, as well as to policymakers and civil society organizations.

This book presents revealing reflections on historical, socio-political, and legal aspects, as well as their contexts, in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Further, it includes theoretical and empirical analyses that identify the connections between religion and politics that characterize Latin American countries in general. The individual chapters are based on a dialogue between regional and international approaches, renewing them and taking them to their limits by incorporating the Latin American experience. The book reflects the current intensification of research on religion in Latin America, the resulting reassessment of previous approaches, and the strengthening of empirical studies. It provides vital insight into the ways in which politics regulates the religious sphere, as well as how religion modulates and intervenes in politics in Latin America. In doing so it builds a bridge between the findings of researchers in the region on the one hand and the English-speaking academic public on the other, contributing to a dialogue that enriches comparative perspectives.

Complex and profound changes have been taking place in the Latin American Catholic Church in the 20th century which have often been misunderstood and misrepresented. This is a collection of essays written by scholars working in the fields of history, political science, sociology, law and theology.

This comprehensive volume offers fresh insights on Latin American and Caribbean law before European contact, during the colonial and early republican eras and up to the present. It considers the history of legal education, the legal profession, Indigenous legal history, and the legal history concerning Africans and African Americans, other enslaved peoples, women, immigrants, peasants, and workers. This book also examines the various legal frameworks concerning land and other property, commerce and business, labor, crime, marriage, family and domestic conflicts, the church, the welfare state, constitutional law and rights, and legal pluralism. It serves as a current introduction for those new to the field and provides in-depth interpretations, discussions, and bibliographies for those already familiar with the region’s legal history. Contributors are: Diego Acosta, Alejandro Agüero, Sarah C. Chambers, Robert J. Cottrol, Oscar Cruz Barney, Mariana Dias Paes, Tamar Herzog, Marta Lorente Sariñena, M.C. Mirow, Jerome G. Offner, Brian Owensby, Juan Manuel Palacio, Agustín Parise, Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, Heikki Pihlajamäki, Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, Timo H. Schaefer, William Suárez-Potts, Victor M. Uribe-Uran, Cristián Villalonga, Alex Wisnoski, and Eduardo Zimmermann.

Textbook on law and jurisprudence in Latin America, including an interdisciplinary research analysis of the legal aspects of economic development - covers land reform, commercial law responses to inflation, the role of the courts, etc., includes a case study of legal institutional frameworks in the caracas urban area slums in Venezuela, and provides historical background. References.

This book examines the recent phenomenon in Latin America of national Truth and Reconciliation commissions. Few studies have examined the role of Churches or religion in political processes that proclaim valued theological terms as their agenda - truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This book questions the role of religion, specifically of established Churches. The impact of such reconciliation commissions on Indigenous Native Americans is also examined, as is the role of women and how both commissions and Churches or religions were challenged by their experiences. The contributors offer differing perspectives on one or more national truth and reconciliation processes and thus offer a collection that serves as valuable source for the disciplines of Religious Studies, Ethics, Theology, Political Science, Social Sciences and Women's Studies.