Every student of Spanish history must be struck (I am tempted to say flabbergasted) by the wonderful proliferation of laws which began in Roman times and continued without interruption down through what Malagón-Barcelo calls the Golden Age. This immense volume of literature, surpassing, I should guess, that of any other genre, is at such variance with the conduct of the people whom the laws were designed to regulate that some kind of cause-and-effect relationship may be indicated; for the Spaniards have always been the least observant of the rules laid down by their jurists. The latter could think of no better way to combat this tendency of their countrymen than to pass more and more laws, until Spain and her colonies were living under a vast canopy of paper. And naturally, according to Parkinson’s Law, each new regulation brought in its wake a new set of bureaucrats, and these in turn begat more laws and more bureaucrats. The astonishing thing about this endless process is that the Spanish empire survived some centuries of it, and it survived, I imagine, because of a tacit conspiracy among ordinary folks to circumvent the law—no very difficult matter usually, because the underpaid bureaucrats were notoriously venal and joined in the conspiracy.
All this is quite outside the purpose and scope of Malagón-Barcelo’s useful and well-organized guide to the juridical literature of New Spain.
