“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

along rivertine trading corridors. What made sense in terms of establishing the economic
connections necessary to sustain cross-border trade equally made sense in vindicating legal
rights. Assembling local allies in support of legal claims not only protected an individual’s
legal position, but also further crystallized reciprocal ties and personal allegiances that
formed the bedrock of commercial chains.
As litigants struggled to secure their legal rights, they equally sharpened cross-border
factional allegiances. Powerful figures in the borderlands, men like Justo José Urquiza in
Entre Ríos and David Canabarro in the Brazilian borderlands, secured their bases of power
by guaranteeing legal relationships and offering localized justice as a form of patronage.
Whenever state actors sought to clamp down on either cross-border economic connections
or the local juridical relationships underpinning them, they faced powerful and entrenched
opposition from a host of borderlands figures. In fact, resistance to centralized state
authority proved so intractable precisely because it was rooted in these borderlands legalities
and not in lawlessness or anarchy. These relationships also proved surprisingly durable.
Even as centralized states gradually extended their institutional authority and coercive power
over their peripheries in the 1860s and 1870s, borderlands actors could still compel states to
incorporate elements of their own legalities into national legal structures.
State-Formation from the Outside-In
This dissertation utilizes the observations about alternative borderlands legalities also
as a means to describe the legal history of a region where there was little agreement as to the
basic elements of sovereignty. In this way, it informs other works that have likewise stressed
the conflicts at the heart of emerging national structures. For example, scholars in recent
years have focused on the role of subaltern groups in struggles over national identities and
destinies. Innovative studies by Marixa Lasso, Peter Blanchard and Peter Guardino among
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