This chapter examines the ways in which the sovereign, monocultural, and monist state that was dominant in Latin America starting in the nineteenth century has mutated over the last thirty-six years. It begins by offering a description of the initially dominant model and then introduces the multicultural liberal and radical intercultural models that replaced it by politically and legally recognizing the cultural diversity that characterizes Latin American societies. The chapter then explores the discursive and practical challenges generated by illegal normative systems (such as those managed by guerilla or paramilitary groups, or criminal organizations), and by extralegal normative system (such as the regulation of private property in peripheral urban neighborhoods) which compete with the sovereignty of states and official law. The constitutional bloc, the Inter-American Human Rights System, and bilateral or multilateral treaties signed by Latin American states further pluralize legal creation and weaken the concept of absolute state sovereignty. This chapter characterizes these developments as instances of either weak or strong legal pluralism.

In liberal democracies, lawyers have societal obligations that are directly connected to the right of access to justice. Access to justice provides citizens with the ability to turn to the judicial and administrative bodies of the state to enforce their rights. The right of access to justice is multifaceted. It may include the ability to introduce and challenge evidence presented at trial, to have a translator when necessary to understand the trial proceedings, and to have a lawyer represent one’s interests before state judicial and administrative bodies. Modern liberal democracies have developed four institutions to realize the state’s and lawyers’ obligations to the right of all members of the political community to access a lawyer: public defender’s offices, court-appointed counsel, legal clinics, and pro bono work. These institutions aim to eliminate the access-to-justice deficit that exists in all modern liberal democracies to varying degrees.

In the fourth chapter of the book I examine the third and last moment of the genealogy of modern comparative law: comparative law as an autonomous discipline. The mythical moment in which the discipline emerges is the First International Comparative Law Conference organized in Paris in 1900. This conference established the discipline's general objectives - on one hand, the unification and harmonization of legal systems. This purpose, animated by the cosmopolitan spirit of its promoters, emphasized the similarities that the legal orders of the world have and evaluated the idea of unity of law positively. On the other hand, the creation of taxonomies that allow for ordering, describing, and understanding the complexities of the legal world. The paradigmatic product generated by the realization of this objective was the concept of legal families. This idea constitutes one of the axes of twentieth-century comparative law and remains relevant in the happenings of the twenty-first century.The concept of legal families is articulated and developed paradigmatically in the work of René David, in France, and K. Zweigert and H. Kötz, in Germany. In this chapter, I examine the types of subject, geographies, and ideas of legal history created by the legal families narrative constructed by these paradigmatic authors.

In the last chapter of the book, I examine the theoretical perspectives that question the narrative created by comparative modern law. Comparative law’s thought structures dominate an important part of the modern legal and political imagination. Nevertheless, these structures do not absolutely govern the way in which moderns give meaning to their experience. In its margins, there are theoretical perspectives that question them and try to articulate alternative normative horizons. Three of these perspectives are the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the postcolonial studies of law, and critical comparative law. Each of these intellectual movements pursues distinct, precise objectives, such as the questioning of the imperial dimensions of international law, the critique of neocolonial legal relationships, or the questioning of the traditional methods and objectives of comparative law. Nevertheless, these movements share some elements that constitute this chapter's object of analysis. The aim of the chapter is thus not examining all dimensions, arguments, and authors that form each of these perspectives. What the chapter seeks is to describe and analyze how the three interact with the structures of thought of comparative law that form the basis of modern law. These intellectual movements describe these structures of thought as dominant, evaluate them negatively, and intend to replace them.

The third chapter of the book analyzes the second moment in this genealogy of modern comparative law: comparative legislative studies. This second lapse in the construction of comparative law has its primary development in the nineteenth century. In this chapter, in particular, I examine Henry Summer Maine's work. The specialized literature recognizes him as another of the founding fathers of the discipline. The analysis of Maine's work revolves around three axes. In the first, the most important, I examine the concept of evolution as progress that the author is committed to. The historical method and the comparative method are the instruments that, for Maine, allow for describing and examining the legal and political evolution of humanity. For Maine, Europe is the locus of progress while India, as a paradigmatic representation of the Orient and of an undifferentiated "rest of the world," is the locus of barbarianism. The line that contains history is also occupied by a dual conceptual geography: on one hand, modern Indo-Europe and barbarian Indo-Europe, on the other, modern and barbarian Indo-Europe (that have a common culture) and the rest of the uncivilized world. In the narrative that Maine constructs, this spatial and temporal axis is also inhabited by particular subjectivities: the modern European, the Indian (as a representative of the oriental) and the individual from the savage rest of the world.

Legal Barbarians has two general objectives that intersect and complement each other. On one hand, the book seeks to describe and analyze how modern comparative law has contributed to the construction of modern subjectivities. On the other hand, it seeks to describe and analyze how this field of law has contributed to creating conceptual geographies and ways of understanding history that have influenced the legal conscience of individuals directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, linked to enlightened modernity.

In the first chapter, I explore the relationship between narrative and identity. More precisely, in this chapter, I argue (i) that narratives construct and give unity to individual and collective identities; (ii) that modern law, understood as part of modern culture and not as its consequence, constructs a narrative that has contributed to the creation of the modern subject – a narrative that is built around the conceptual opposition "subject of law/legal barbarian"; and (iii) that comparative law has played a central role in the formation of this conceptual opposition. Comparative law has been fundamental for forming the legal “self” and "other" of modernity.

In the second chapter of the book I explore the first moment of the genealogy of modern comparative law. This first moment, instrumental comparative studies, is where modern comparative law emerges. In this stage, comparative law is not interpreted as an autonomous discipline within the law. Rather, comparative studies are an instrument for the advance of other disciplines or of other areas of law. In this section of the book, more precisely, I focus on the analysis of Montesquieu's work. This author is particularly important given that the specialized literature recognizes him as the father of modern comparative law. Montesquieu has been interpreted by this literature as the person who uses the comparative method paradigmatically in this first moment of the discipline; his work has come to represent emblematic forms of the use of this method; some of his conclusions have become part of the canon of modern law and politics. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu uses empirical information on the law and politics of European and non-European countries to justify his theses on the relationship between natural law and positive law and on the links between positive law and the geographic and psychological characteristics of peoples, as well as to promote a normative political agenda: a legally limited monarchy for his political community. In the process, Montesquieu constructs subjectivities that are central in the creation of modern law: the European and the Asian. In addition, Montesquieu constructs an imagined space that these two types of subjects inhabit: Europe and Asia. Finally, Montesquieu imagines legal and political time in a dual manner: inertially static and dynamic in potency