Dall’Italia alle Indie

Un viaggio del diritto comune

Abstract

The reception of the ius commune in the Spanish Indies is a common image in legal discourse. Coming from Italy via Spain, the ius commune seemed both to transfer to Central and South America and to reproduce there a legal system based on a dialectical relationship between the general and the specific. This allowed legal historians to bring the radical diversity of the American world back within a spiritual unity and a common scientific and Christian legal tradition, and at the same time enabled them to substitute the previous narratives founded on the supremacy of the derecho de Castilla. The article reconstructs the stages of this transfer and deals with the discursive strategies used by legal historians to define the derecho indiano and describing its relationship with the ius commune and the derecho castillano.