A Spanish Legal Journal Defining the Centre and the Periphery: Revista de Legislación y Jurisprudencia de Ultramar (1877–1878)
A Spanish Legal Journal Defining the Centre and the Periphery: Revista de Legislación y Jurisprudencia de Ultramar (1877–1878)

Summary/Abstract: Overseas was present in the general Spanish press, but there was a special press of jurists. Since the Revista de Jurisprudencia was founded in 1856 in La Habana, as the first legal journal from Overseas, until the last ones published in 1898, we have a constellation of legal journals that allow us to see the changes in this domain of Law. The movement of legal journals followed a path of decentralization in three oceans throughout the century that made it possible to connect Madrid, La Habana and Manila. This article focuses on a specific title: The Overseas Journal as a medium in which Spanish jurists reasoned what law should apply in Spanish colonial possessions, which they termed Provincias de Ultramar (Overseas Provinces) or simply colonias (colonies). The consideration of separate legal frameworks for the metropole and its peripheral territories, as evident throughout the pages of The Overseas Journal, demonstrates how distinct legal spaces within the same political entity were articulated. Legal communication within a trioceanic scope was at the service of the creation of this legal space dominated by exceptions. Thus, almost all the contents are aimed at contributing to the analysis and delimitation of this Overseas Law, a series of discussions with peninsular authors, and a certain form of social and legal organization that defended itself through commentary and its discursive reproduction.

• Details
• Contents