“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

the reputation of representatives and their ability to use it to gain access to justice at each
local link along commercial chains.
Because local reputation played such a critical role in obtaining justice and
maintaining borderlands commercial relationships, cases involving assaults on personal
honor constituted a central front in factional legal politics in the town. A review of some 23
juicios de imprenta from the Salto courts reveals how factions challenged the reputation of their
enemies while working to protect the status of their own allies through these types of judicial
proceedings. These reputational battles intertwined with conflicts over the distribution of
private law rights. In particular, as local officials sought to delineate property rights and
offer protection for commercial transactions to bolster their local support, their rivals
brought their reputations into question. In doing so, they laid the basis for challenging the
legitimacy of legal claims altogether. They equally created renewed possibilities for factional
conflicts around borderlands courtrooms.
Juicios de imprenta, which involved in one commentator’s words “abuses of the
freedom of the press,” were uniquely public proceedings. 76 Within this general rubric, juicios
de imprenta covered an expansive range of topics, including general defamation of character,
injury through “offensive allusions to honor or reputation” and publishing false criminal
allegations against another. To bring charges, an aggrieved litigant petitioned the alcalde
ordinario, presenting complete copies of the offending publication. The alcalde ordinario then
was required by law to summon both litigants to a “public place” in order to select a jury to
hear the initial proceeding. The alcalde received a list of seventy names of “citizens” over the
age of twenty-five to hear the matter. He then selected seven names at random in front of
76 Adolfo Rodriguez, El Digesto Nacional: Compendio de las Leyes, Decretos del Gobierno y
Demas Resoluciones y Actos Oficiales de la República Oriental del Uruguay (Montevideo:
Establecimiento Tipográfico y Litográfico de Luciano Mege, 1860), 164-65.
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