This article reconstructs judicial practice in Cauca, Republic of Colombia, through the close reading of two criminal court cases involving enslaved litigants during the early transition from colony to independent state. In 1825, the enactment of laws that created new courts, judgeships, and procedures aimed to restructure and strengthen judicial practice in a nascent republic convulsed by internal division, which would disintegrate politically in 1831. Enslaved people—who had a long engagement with the law since colonial times—litigated in this context of political and judicial transformation in cases about adultery, theft, murder, vagrancy, cruelty, and freedom. This article sheds light on how these litigants were caught in the tensions that emerged between low- and high-ranking legal authorities over conflicting understandings of the role of religious thinking and the use of emotions in the adjudication of criminal cases and their appeals. In addition to drawing from the rich scholarship on slavery and the law in Latin America, this article broadly addresses recent calls from Latin America-based scholars to nourish national historiographies by inserting “the emotional” into the analytical framework. Through this approach, enslaved litigants appear moving through an uneven judicial apparatus in which authorities tried balancing their desire to uphold new procedural rules to create a secular legal sphere on the one hand and their personal religious convictions and status as enslavers on the other.

中文翻译：

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哥伦比亚考卡的奴隶诉讼当事人、情绪和不断变化的法律格局（1825-1831）

本文通过仔细阅读在从殖民地向独立国家的早期过渡期间涉及被奴役诉讼当事人的两起刑事法庭案件，重建了哥伦比亚共和国考卡的司法实践。1825 年，颁布了创建新法院、法官和程序的法律，旨在重组和加强因内部分裂而动摇的新生共和国的司法实践，该共和国将在 1831 年在政治上解体。被奴役的人——长期从事法律工作的人自殖民时代以来——在政治和司法转型的背景下就通奸、盗窃、谋杀、流浪、残忍和自由案件进行诉讼。本文阐明了这些诉讼当事人是如何陷入低级和高级法律当局之间因对宗教思想的作用和在刑事案件的裁决及其上诉中使用情感的理解相互冲突而出现的紧张关系。除了借鉴拉丁美洲关于奴隶制和法律的丰富学术成果外，本文还广泛回应了拉丁美洲学者最近提出的通过将“情感”插入分析框架来滋养国家史学的呼吁。通过这种方法，被奴役的诉讼当事人似乎在一个不平衡的司法机构中移动，当局一方面试图平衡他们维护新程序规则以创建世俗法律领域的愿望，另一方面是他们作为奴隶的个人宗教信仰和地位。