Building a Judicial System: Judicial Reform in Buenos Aires in the First Postcolonial Years (1810-1830).

This paper describes the juridical and judicial reforms in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in the two first decades of the independent period (1810-1830). After the collapse of Spanish rule and in the middle of a growing circulation of Enlightned discourses, Latin American elites faced the challenge of founding over new (secular, consensual) basis the political order. In that context, the rethoric of the "rule of law" and "government of law" became -if certainly an unachieved imperative- a shared argumentative place of creole elites. Scholarship on legal history use to analyse in "transitional" term this period supposing the goals these actors "should have pursued" were evident and, doing so, it has neglect the specifity of the period itself. Focusing in the city of Buenos Aires, as a case study, this paper analyse the contemporary dilemmas around law and justice (the constitution of juries, the organisation of professional spheres, the use of judicial system to persecute political enemies, the division of powers) that politicians, publicists and a nascent "public opinion" discussed and the alternatives they considered, without judging them as incomplete or imperfect aplications of foreing ideas. Restore the contingent dimension of the administration of justice reforms in the revolutionary period and describe his gravitation in the actual feature of the judicial system are the main purposes of this essay. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]