EPISODE 40: Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog

In this episode guest host Shaayan Tiwari talks with Tamar Herzog and Thomas Duve about their co-edited volume, "The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective"(CUP, 2024). The book is the first volume to construct a truly pan-Latin American legal narrative and set it within the larger global frame.

Professor Tamar Herzog is the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard University, with an affiliation at Harvard Law School. Her scholarship cuts straight to the core of colonial legal dynamics. She has studied the relationship between Spain, Portugal, and their colonies, focusing on how legal norms responded to both material and symbolic constraints. She delves into colonial institutions in everyday life, examining how penal justice functioned in Quito, how scribes operated in Spanish America, how citizenship and land rights were contested, and how territorial boundaries emerged through negotiation rather than top-down decree. She has been described as relentless in revealing how individuals and institutions shaped law, as rigorous as they come.

Professor Thomas Duve is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and a professor of Comparative Legal History at Goethe University Frankfurt. He specializes in global legal history, particularly the entanglements between secular and religious normativity in the Iberian world, the early modern period. He is known for advancing legal history as the study of the production of normativity through translation, a nuanced angle that refuses reductive approaches.