Tamar Herzog

Tamar Herzog is Professor of Latin American Affairs and Monroe Gutman Professor at Harvard University, as well as an Associate Faculty Member at Harvard Law School. A historian specialising in the legal history of Spain, Portugal, and their overseas territories, she has worked on a wide range of topics including colonial administration, criminal justice, scribes, citizenship, land rights, and territorial disputes. She is the author of seven monographs, three edited volumes, and more than 140 articles.

The project

Title: The Critique of Legal Formalism in the Transatlantic Space

"This project consists of a series of four seminars, each exploring what legal history can contribute to historical research. If law is understood as a technology for problem-solving and conflict resolution, how can it help us better understand the past? I aim to address these questions by examining four distinct fields and time periods, all of which also speak to contemporary dilemmas.

1. Slavery: A Critique of North America-Centred Scholarship. This seminar examines some of the prevailing conventions in slavery studies, shaped largely by the dominance of scholarship on the late 18th- and 19th-century United States. It proposes alternative lines of inquiry that may help us move beyond this narrow focus.
2. Rights: A Historian’s Perspective. Focusing on the early modern Hispanic world, this seminar explores the historical development of rights, demonstrating that rights and duties were historically intertwined. Understanding one without the other, it argues, leads to an incomplete picture.
3. Derecho Indiano: Was There a Spanish Colonial Law? This seminar considers whether a distinct colonial legal system existed in the early modern Iberian world. By analysing Iberian and Iberian-American legal history, it asks when the notion of “colonial law” emerged and what it was intended to achieve.
4. Tombos: A Project on Law and Writing. Introducing a new research project, this seminar explores why various cultures began to commit legal norms and rights to writing, and how this act transformed legal reality. It focuses on the Portuguese experience with tombos—land title records—across the medieval, early modern, and 19th centuries.

Hosting institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• Une brève histoire du droit en Europe : les 2500 dernières années. Toulouse : Anacharsis, 2023 (a French translation of A Short history of European law).
• Ed., The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press (forthcoming) (co-edited with Thomas Duve).
• Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge MA : Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Upholding Justice: State, Law and the Penal System in Quito. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2004
• Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.