“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

political community. 28 These scholars have consistently shown that we are likely to find law
and legal practices in peripheral and “stateless” spaces if we look beneath outward
appearances of violence and disorder.
Building upon these observations about the pervasiveness of law and the deep
currents of underlying order that have emerged from the historiography throughout the
Americas, this dissertation describes the alternative legal order that developed in what was
perhaps the Río de la Plata’s most contested zone. To describe this order, this dissertation
draws primarily upon a set of more than five hundred civil and criminal court cases from
local tribunals in the sharply disputed grounds along the Uruguay River in the middle
decades of the 19 th century. These cases provide evidence of a borderlands legal order that,
in lieu of colonial pacts or formal, state-centered legal relationships, fundamentally rested on
personal reputation, reciprocal connections and traditional notions of local citizenship or
vecindad. These shared notions, or “legalities” to use Christopher Tomlins term, provided a
framework for borderlands residents to vindicate their legal rights and establish their social
place in a turbulent world. 29
Borderlands legalities revolved around local law and legal institutions. At its most
basic level, “local law” was just that – local. It rested less upon doctrine than on the local
connections a litigant could draw upon in establishing a claim. 30 This in turn reflected the
internal logic of the growing trading networks linking various borderlands nodes together
28 Lauren Benton, "'The Laws of This Country': Foreigners and the Legal Construction
of Sovereignty in Uruguay, 1830-1875," Law and History Review Fall 2001.
29 Chrsitopher Tomlins, “The Many Legalities of Colonization: A Manifesto of Destiny
for Early American Legal History” in Chrsitopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, ed. The
Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 2-3.
30 Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of
Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),
Jessica K. Lowe, "A Separate Peace? The Politics of Localized Law in the Post-
Revolutionary Era," Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2011).
16