Embark on a captivating exploration of legal history with «Manual de Historia del Derecho,» released on October 6, 2023. This enriching book takes you on a fascinating journey through the origins of law in Chile, unraveling key concepts and tracing its evolution. Delving into the importance of law in the country’s education system, it navigates from the influence of Roman law to the inception of the earliest universities. The author intricately weaves historical contexts, exploring the rise of Al-Andalus and the Catholic Hispanic kingdoms. Additionally, delve into the synthesis of the medieval legal system in Hispanic territories, spotlighting King Alfonso X’s profound influence through «Las Partidas» in normative unification.
Tomas Garay Perez is a lawyer from the University of Atacama. He has balanced his career as a public official and academic teacher with social and political leadership. His first publication entitled “Manual de Historia del derecho. Baja Edad Media: formación del ius commune y su recepción en Castilla,” is a legal outreach book that seeks to bring the academic and legal world closer to the citizenry, democratizing the access to the guiding principles of the Chilean legal framework. Currently, he serves as Seremi of Justice and Human Rights in the Atacama Region.
The following is an excerpt from the introduction of «Manual de Historia del Derecho», where Tomas explains how he came to write this fascinating book:
«Over time, I became an assistant student at my alma mater, focusing mainly on the Spanish Law History and, above all, on the development of Common Law (ius commune) and its reception in Castile, which was the subject of my undergraduate thesis.
Between 2011 and 2018, I thought at the university where I was educated, alternatively teaching courses on the History of Legal Institutions and Institutions of Roman Law During that time, I tried to provide study material to the students to facilitate the teaching-learning processes, considering that the available bibliography at times proved to be too extensive for the objectives outlined in the respective programs. Likewise, I carried out a revision of my undergraduate thesis, making corrections and modifying what was pertinent, in order to provide the students with a text that could complement their lessons. All this work was conducted by rescuing aspects of the multifaceted conception proposed by the legal historian Eric Palma González, since 1997, and whose analysis will be developed in the first chapter of the present work. This perspective, in short, situates the Law History as a specialty of history and, consequently, its object of study falls on the normative and extra-normative phenomena —social, cultural, religious, economic, etc.— that converge in the formation of law at a given time.»
