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From Chaos to Continuity: The Evolution of Louisiana's Judicial System, 1712-1862

Louisiana's legal patterns have long been thought to be anathema to larger American forms of jurisprudence. Mark F. Fernandez turns that assumption on its head in From Chaos to Continuity. He rejects the notion that Louisiana's "civilian system differs too much from the marriage of codes and common law that typified American practice in the nineteenth century" (xii). Instead he expertly argues that Louisiana's patterns of judicial development strongly and consciously resemble that of other American states. Fernandez's analysis of Louisiana's courts shows us how the state's antebellum legal system struggled to define itself in terms of the growing United States, rather than in spite of it. The chaos before the continuity in this book begins in the colonial period. A brief overview of Louisiana's French and Spanish past in chapter one sets the stage for the American period. From 1712 until 1762, France loosely guided the governance of Louisiana. During that period a system of courts developed that Fernandez characterizes as "often exceeding the quality of the mother country's courts in both civil and criminal cases" (4). In 1762, France ceded Louisiana to Spain to help pay war debts from the Seven Years' War. After seven years of ineffective transitional leadership, Alejandro O'Reilly took control of the government in New Orleans. He quickly dissolved the existing Superior Council, which had served as the colony's judicial body under France, and set up the cabildo as the official "residence of the administrative and judicial offices of the Spanish government" (13). Cabildo officers as well as the Spanish governors held judicial responsibilities under the new system. By the end of the eighteenth century Louisiana's colonial courts seemed to function to the liking of its diverse population. The smooth transition between French codes and the relatively similar civilian system of Castile, however, would not be replicated during Louisiana's move to American control.