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Summary: This work addresses the circulation of legal literature from the Hispanic world into the British Atlantic during the 18th century and within the broader context of the Americas. It wants to break free from the dichotomy between British and Hispanic Atlantic by looking at the early Americas as a space where legal literature moved across borders. The case study analyzed in this work is that of the 17th century Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira and its circulation in the British Atlantic. By analyzing the writings of a number of legal practitioners from the British Atlantic (such as James Otis, James Abercromby, and Adam Smith), I discuss the extent to which their knowledge of Solórzano's work showed a transnational approach when discussing the relationship between the thirteen American colonies and their British mother-country. This study calls scholars' attention to a number of networks of circulation for legal literature that possibly had more influence than has usually been acknowledged on the legal history of the United States of America. Ultimately, the article shows that much is left to discover about the practical, generative, aspects of legal history in an early modern scenario where Europe and the Americas need to be seen in more nuanced and balanced ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study discusses hitherto unknown aspects concerning the papal censure of the work by the Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira, author of the two-volume treatise on Derecho indiano, known as the Disputationes de Indiarum Iure. Immediately after the publication of its second part in 1639, the Curia (under the government of Pope Urban VIII Barberini) prompted the Congregation of the Index in Rome to examine Solórzano's seminal treatise and, eventually, condemn its section about Spain's royal patronage of the Church. By looking at the circumstances of the censure (e.g. the early ‘leak’ orchestrated by the Congregation, the other reports about the censure), the present work aims at bringing to the attention of scholars the Solórzano file conserved in the Vatican archives. Considering both the reasons of the censure and the circumstances under which it developed, the present study sheds new light on the complex relationship between Spain and the Papacy in the first half of the seventeenth century and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]