¹ de Vidaurre, Manuel Lorenzo, Proyecto del Código Civil peruano dividido en tres partes, 3^a parte (Lima: Imprenta del Constitucional, 1836), 46Google Scholar.

² Glendon, Mary Ann, The Transformation of Family Law. State, Law, and Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Coontz, Stephanie, Marriage, a History. How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2006)Google Scholar.

³ Ibid.; Giddens, Anthony, The Transformation of Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴ Reid, Kenneth, de Waal, Marius J., and Zimmermann, Reinhard, “Intestate Succession in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in Comparative Succession Law, eds. Kenneth Reid, Marius J. de Waal, and Reinhard Zimmermann, vol. 2 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 489–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See Brito, Alejandro Guzmán, La codificación civil en Iberoamérica. Siglos XIX y XX (Santiago: ed. Jurídica de Chile, 2000)Google Scholar for a country-by-country summary of analyses of the influence of European codes on these new civil codes.

⁶ For comparative analyses of nineteenth-century succession law, see Mirow, Michael C., Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), ch. 17Google Scholar, and Brito, Alejandro Guzmán, “La pervivencia de instituciones sucesorias castellano-indianas en las codificaciones hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX,” in Derecho, instituciones y procesos históricos, eds. José de la Puente Brunke and Jorge Armando Guevara Gil, vol. 3 (Lima: Fondo ed. de la PUC del Perú, 2008), 31–88Google Scholar. Both focus almost exclusively on the rules governing wills.

⁷ Anzoátegui, Victor Tau, Esquema histórico del derecho sucesorio del medievo castellano al siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: La Ley, 1971)Google Scholar.

⁸ Schmidt, Jan Peter, “Intestate Succession in Latin America,” in Comparative Succession Law, eds. Kenneth Reid, Marius J. de Waal, and Reinhard Zimmermann, vol. 2 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 119–59Google Scholar.

⁹ Bushnell, David and Macaulay, Neill, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Donghi, Tulio Halperin, “Argentina: Liberalism in a Country Born Liberal,” in Guiding the Invisible Hand. Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History, eds. Joseph L. Love and Nils Jacobsen (New York: Praeger, 1988), 99–116Google Scholar; Zahler, Reuben, Ambitious Rebels. Remaking Honor, Law and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 22–40Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Bentham's student, Etienne Dumont, synthesized his writings as The Principles of Morals and Legislation and translated and published this collection in Paris in 1802; a Spanish translation of this French tome was published in Madrid in 1822. Bentham's work also reached Latin America through the monthly periodical, El Español, published between 1810 and 1814, which was funded by the British Foreign Office. Moreover, Bentham corresponded with many of the independence leaders. See Schwartz, Pedro, “La correspondencia ibérica de Jeremy Bentham,” in Bello y Londres. Segundo Congreso del Bicentenario, eds. Fundación La Casa de Bello and Comisión Nacional para la Celebración del Bicentenario (Caracas: Fundación La Casa de Bello, 1980), 225–64Google Scholar.

¹¹ Goyena, Florencio García, Concordancias, motivos y comentarios del Código Civil Español (Madrid: Imp. de la Sociedad Tipográfico-Editorial, 1852), 188–90Google Scholar.

¹² The records on congressional debates, when available, were less useful. The congress often ceded responsibility to the executive branch for commissioning, reviewing, and promulgating these codes, usually approving the civil code without much discussion of its content.

¹³ Tau Anzoátegui, Esquema histórico, 116.

¹⁴ Under colonial law, the share of an estate that an individual could bequest to whomever they chose was one-fifth; four-fifths was restricted to the forced heirs (legitimate descendants or ascendants). On the debate over increasing this “free” share or doing away with such restrictions, see Guzmán Brito, “La pervivencia de instituciones”; Silvia Arrom, “Changes in Mexican Family Law in the Nineteenth Century: The Civil Codes of 1870 and 1884,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985): 305–17; and Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, “Liberalism and Married Women's Property Rights in Nineteenth Century Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2005): 627–78.

¹⁵ Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer, “The Family and Society in Nineteenth-century Latin America: An Historiographical Introduction,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985): 215–34.

¹⁶ Natural children are those born of unmarried parents who under the rules of the Catholic church faced no impediments to marry.

¹⁷ García Goyena, Concordancias, Appendix 10, and Tau Anzoátegui, Esquema histórico.

¹⁸ Sixth Partida, Title 13, Law 6, in Gregorio López, Las Siete Partidas del Rey Don Alfonso El Sabio cotejadas con varios códices antiguos por la Real Academia de la Historia y Glosadas por el Lic. Gregorio López (Paris: Librería de Rosa Bouret y Cia. 1951, orig. 1855). This section also draws on Joaquin Escriche, trans. Bethel Coopwood, Elements of the Spanish Law, 3rd ed. (Austin, TX: Triplett & Hutchings, 1886, orig. 1840), and José María Ots y Capdequí, “Bosquejo histórico de los derechos de la mujer en la legislación de Indias,” Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia 138 (1918): 161–82.

¹⁹ Sixth Partida, Title 13, Law 7 in López, Las Siete Partidas.

²⁰ Ibid., Title 13, Laws 3 and 15.

²¹ Book 10, Title 4, Laws 1–5, Novísima Recopilación de las Leyes de España, of 1804, vol. 3 (Mexico City: Galván, Librero, 1851), and Ots y Capdequí, “Bosquejo histórico,” 54–56.

²² Edith Couturier, “Women and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985): 294–304; Eugene Korth and Della M. Flusche, “Dowry and Inheritance in Colonial Spanish-America: Peninsular Law and Chilean Practice,” The Americas 43, no. 4 (1987): 395–410.

²³ García Goyena, Concordancias, 360; Dalmacio Vélez Sársfield, Proyecto de Código Civil para la República Argentina, vol. 4 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Pablo Coni, 1869), 1077.

²⁴ Asunción Lavrin and Edith Couturier, “Dowries and Wills: A View of Women's Socio-economic Role in Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640–1790,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 2 (1979): 280–304; Couturier, “Women and the Family”; Arrom, “Changes in Mexican Family Law.”

²⁵ María Isabel Seone, Historia de la dote en el derecho Argentino (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigación de la Historia del Derecho, 1982); Christine Hünefeldt, Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth Century Peru (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, “Las esposas y sus derechos de acceso a la propiedad en Costa Rica durante el siglo XIX,” in ¿Ruptura de la inequidad? Propiedad y género en la América Latina del siglo XIX, eds. Magdalena León and Eugenia Rodríguez (Bogota: Siglo del Hombre eds., 2005), 183–232.

²⁶ Seone, Historia de la dote.

²⁷ Arrom, “Changes in Mexican Family Law.”

²⁸ Mirow, Latin American Law, 18, suggests that the Novísima Recopilación was rarely applied in the colonies. For example, it does not seem to have been applied in Chile; Andrés Bello, “Sucesión intestada,” of 1833, in Obras completas de Don Andrés Bello, ed. Consejo de Instrucción Pública, vol. 9 (Santiago: Pedro G. Ramírez, 1885), 243–62.

²⁹ Novísima Recopilación, Book 10, Title XX, Law 3.

³⁰ Escriche, Elements, 110–11, interpreted this law in such a way for Spain.

³¹ Most of the new republics made multiple attempts to develop their own civil codes, with codification commissions appointed and disbanded following the frequent changes in government; Guzmán Brito, La codificación civil.

³² On legal education, the use of Bentham in law school curriculums after independence and the controversies over his work, see Mirow, Latin American Law, 116–17, and Victor M. Uribe-Urán, Honorable Lives. Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia, 1780–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 108–12.

³³ Jeremy Bentham, “Principles of the Civil Code” in Theory of Legislation, of 1802, translated from the French edition of Etienne Dumont by Richard Hildreth, vol. 2 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1908), 177–79.

³⁴ John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economywith Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, of 1848, ed. W. J. (William James) Ashley (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), 221–29.

³⁵ Mill, ibid., 223, attributed this position to Bentham which suggests that the latter may have proposed making the line of succession even more restrictive in his later writings.

³⁶ See Guzmán Brito, La codificación civil; Mirow, Latin American Law, 133–41; and Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, Latin American Lawyers. A Historical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 61–64.

³⁷ Barrister of the Inner Temple, Code Napoleon or the French Civil Code, of 1804 (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 1999), arts. 745–68. France did not improve the position of spouses until 1891, when they were given a usufruct right to one-quarter of the deceased's estate. Nicolas Boring, “France,” in Inheritance Laws in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Law Library (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2014), 1–5.

³⁸ Guzmán Brito, La codificación civil, 283–92; Luis Rodríguez Ennes, “Florencio García Goyena y la codificación iberoamericana,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español, 87 (2006): 703–26.

³⁹ For example, under the twelfth century Fuero Juzgo, the widow was in a better position than under the inheritance law which later evolved in Castile, since she was entitled to a usufruct share equal to that of a child if she did not remarry. Moreover, she stood to inherit her husband's full estate in the absence of descendants, ascendants, or collaterals to the 7th degree. Under the fueros of Navarra and Aragón she received far superior treatment, being entitled to the usufruct of all her deceased husband's assets. García Goyena considered it an error, nonetheless, to separate the usufruct and property of assets since it restricted the circulation of property. He was also concerned about children having to wait until a widow's death for them to inherit since this delayed their being able to establish themselves; García Goyena, Concordancias, 359–61.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 189.

⁴¹ Ibid., 360.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Ibid., 188–90.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 374.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 372–73.

⁴⁶ Ennes, “Florencio García Goyena.”

⁴⁷ In the 1888 Spanish code, in intestate the surviving spouse only inherited if there were no legitimate or natural children or ascendants, and they shared the estate with the deceased's siblings, being entitled to one-half, but only in usufruct; in the absence of siblings, the spouse received the property rights to the full estate. Spain, Código Civil (Madrid: Imprenta del Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia, 1889), arts. 946–53.

⁴⁸ The Dominican Republic had been part of the French colony of Haiti which after its independence had adopted the Napoleonic Code of 1804. Upon its separation from Haiti, the Dominican Republic adopted the revised French civil code of 1816, in French. See Guzmán Brito, La codificación civil, 189–97.

⁴⁹ See the sources in the Appendix for the reference to the relevant articles on intestate in the codes and other legislation analyzed herein.

⁵⁰ “Ley sobre adquisiciones a nombre del Estado,” Gaceta de Madrid, No. 142, May 22, 1835, 565–66; García Goyena, Concordancias, 187, 195.

⁵¹ “Ley sobre sucesión hereditaria de 16 junio de 1837,” in Legislación vigente de la República de Uruguay, 1494.

⁵² Vidaurre, Proyecto del Código Civil, 145.

⁵³ Guzmán Brito, La codificación civil, 205–11.

⁵⁴ Estado Nor-Peruano, Código Civil Santa-Cruz del Estado Nor-Peruano (Lima: Imprenta de José Masías, 1836), arts. 169–635.

⁵⁵ See Guzmán Brito, La codificación civil, on the circumstances that led each of these countries to take Bello's code as its model, facilitated by the Chilean Foreign Ministry having distributed copies through its embassies. In Ecuador, for example, after many failed attempts, the legislature in 1855 charged the Supreme Court with drafting the civil code. They had already completed over 800 articles when they decided that the Bello code, which they had just accessed, was far superior in structure and content to their own effort and recommended that Ecuador adopt it with minor modifications (ibid., 251). In his tome, Guzmán Brito does not discuss the provisions on succession norms. That the listed codes copied the Chilean code with respect to intestate is based on my analysis of the respective articles listed in the references in the Appendix.

⁵⁶ Note that Uruguay's 1868 code reversed its earlier legislation which had treated spouses more favorably in the line of succession than Bello's code, suggesting that there was not yet total consensus on these issues.

⁵⁷ Several of these codes differed from Bello's code on other aspects, for example, in the absence of a spouse, on how far down the line of succession extended before the estate passed to the state, with this ranging from Chile's 6th degree to the colonial tenth in Ecuador and Uruguay (Appendix Table, column 5).

⁵⁸ See Deere and León, “Liberalism,” 661–73, on the package of reforms of family law undertaken by Mexico and the Central American countries in this period.

⁵⁹ Zamorano, Código civil boliviano, art. 620. Guzmán Brito, “La pervivencia,” 74–75, errs in his interpretation of the cuarta marital—that it disappeared—in the original 1830 Bolivian code (as do Deere and León, “Liberalism,” 658) likely by using an edition of the civil code published after 1882. In 1882 Bolivia adopted Argentina's 1869 intestate rules; in the civil code commentaries published after that date, art. 513 stipulates the content that he cites (that spouses inherit a share equal to a child). Previously, as Rafael Canedo, Código civil boliviano, comentado, concordado y anotado, 2nd ed. (Cochabamba: Imp. y Lit. El Comercio, 1898), 242, confirms, the 1830 code maintained the cuarta marital in its art. 620. Guzmán Brito does not mention which edition he used.

⁶⁰ Manuel Afanacio Fuentes and Miguel Antonio de la Lama, Código Civil de 1852, arts. 918, 926.

⁶¹ Guatemala's 1877 code adopted Peru's formulation of the cuarta conyugal, however, it was more generous since it did not cap the amount that the spouse could receive, nor did it require that gananciales be deducted from the spouse's share.

⁶² Chile, Código civil, art. 982. This was also a principle of the French civil code and one recommended by Bentham, with whose works Bello was familiar, having worked on his papers during his time in London; Schwartz, “La correspondencia.”

⁶³ Chile, Código civil, art. 1172. Bello developed this concept in his first draft of 1841 and maintained it in subsequent drafts, up through approval of the 1855 code. Andrés Bello, “De la sucesión por causa de muerte,” of 1841–1842, in Obras Completas, ed. Consejo de Instrucción Pública, vol. 11a (Santiago: Pedro G. Ramírez, 1887), 96–99.

⁶⁴ It would be in the interest of the spouse to renounce their share of the gananciales if the deceased's individual property considerably exceeded that half, or if the estate were heavily indebted.

⁶⁵ Law No. 4917 of May 1857, in Legislación mexicana, art. 61.

⁶⁶ Justo Sierra, Proyecto de Código Civil Mexicano (Mexico: Imp. de Vicente Torres, 1861), arts. 784–801; see art. 797 on the spousal inheritance shares.

⁶⁷ This point had not been clear in Vélez's original 1869 draft nor in the official civil code published in 1874, Código civil, Book 4, Title IX, arts. 6–8, 12. For internal consistency, the congressional committee appointed to clean up errors for the 1883 official edition added that it was only if spouses concurred with descendants or ascendants that they did not inherit from the deceased's gananciales; Lisandro Segovia, El código civil argentino anotado (Buenos Aires: F. Lajoune, 1894), 655.

⁶⁸ According to Helen I. Clagett, A Guide to the Law and Legal Literature of Paraguay (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1947), 7–8, a copy of the Argentine code was not even published in Paraguay in this period. Later, a July 1889 decree declared the fourth edition of the Argentine code to be the official Paraguayan version.

⁶⁹ “Filiación y reconocimiento de hijos naturales, Ley de 27 de diciembre de 1882,” in Salinas Mariacas, Códigos Bolivianos, 460–63; and Canedo, Código civil boliviano, 241.

⁷⁰ Bushnell and Macaulay, The Emergence; John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (NY: W. W. Norton, 1986); Victor Tau Anzoátegui, La codificación en la Argentina (1810–1870). Mentalidad social e ideas jurídicas (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1977); Zahler, Ambitious Rebels, 28–29.

⁷¹ Tau Anzoátegui, Esquema histórico, 105–10.

⁷² Pedro Somellera, Principios de derecho civil dictados en la Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de los Expósitos, 1824), 145–60.

⁷³ Ibid., 154.

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Abel Cháneton, Historia de Vélez Sársfield, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Librería y Editorial La Facultad, 1938), 57.

⁷⁶ Tau Anzoátegui, Esquema histórico, 119.

⁷⁷ Cháneton, Historia de Vélez, 54; Enrique Udaondo, Diccionario biográfico argentino (Buenos Aires: Imprenta y Ed. Coni, 1938), 1018–19.

⁷⁸ Blanca Zeberio, “Un código para la nación: Familia, mujeres, derechos de propiedad y herencia en Argentina durante el siglo XIX,” in ¿Ruptura de la inequidad?, eds. Magdalena León and Eugenia Rodríguez (Bogota: Siglo del Hombre, 2005), 131–81.

⁷⁹ María Selva Senor, “La institución de herederos en la sucesión ab-intestato: Transformaciones en la concepción de familia y herencia. Buenos Aires durante la primera mitad del Siglo XIX.” Quinto Sol 8 (2004): 73–87.

⁸⁰ Juan Francisco Seguí, “La sucesión ab-intestato excluyendo a la mujer legítima,” 1849 thesis presented to the Faculty of Law, University of Buenos Aires, quoted in Selva Senor, “La institución de herederos,” 80, note 18.

⁸¹ Jorge O. Perrino, Derecho de las Sucesiones, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Abeledo Perrot, 2011), 1432. Pinedo's 1843 thesis is listed among those studied by Zeberio, “Un código para la nación,” 180. Between 1852 and 1861, Buenos Aires was briefly a state when it seceded from the Argentine Confederation.

⁸² Law 128, “Sucesiones intestadas entre cónyuges,” Senate and Chamber of Representatives of the State of Buenos Aires, May 27, 1857, https://normas.gba.gob.ar/ar-b/ley/1857/128/14530 (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁸³ Cháneton, Historia de Vélez, 57–58.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 57.

⁸⁶ Mark D. Szuchman, Order, Family and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810–1860 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Carlos A. Mayo, Porqué la quiero tanto. Historia del amor en la sociedad rioplatense (1750–1860) (Buenos Aires: Ed. Biblas, 2004); Jeffrey Shumway, The Case of the Ugly Suitor and other Histories of Love, Gender and Nation in Buenos Aires, 1776–1870 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

⁸⁷ This is known as the “Generation of 1837,” which mirrored trends in Europe. See Mayo, Porqué la quiero, 63.

⁸⁸ Shumway, The Case of the Ugly Suitor, 139; see Szuchman, Order, Family, 146, on how European social trends tended to be adopted earlier in Argentina than in other parts of Hispanic America due to its greater commercial and cultural contacts.

⁸⁹ Cháneton, Historia de Vélez, vol. 1, 285–87, 387–88. Besides being a professor of civil law, Vélez established his credentials as a codifier by being the co-author of the 1859 commercial code for the state of Buenos Aires. He later served as senator and, when asked to draft the civil code, was serving as president Mitre's minister of finance.

⁹⁰ As he completed each of the code's four books, these were published in draft form between 1865 and 1869. Since his draft book 4 on succession law was the last to be published and the complete draft was then immediately presented to and approved by the congress, the official 1874 version and his 1869 draft on intestate are identical; Tau Anzoátegui, La codificación.

⁹¹ Ibid., 1078.

⁹² Sársfield, Proyecto de Código Civil.

⁹³ His father had been a widower with ten children when he married his mother, with whom he had an additional six children; he died shortly after Vélez's birth. Cháneton, Historia de Vélez, vol. 1, ch. 1.

⁹⁴ Argentina, Código civil, i–ii.

⁹⁵ Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield, “El folleto del Dr. Alberti,” El Nacional (July 1868), reproduced in Juicios críticos sobre el proyecto de código civil argentino, ed. Jorge Cabral Texo (Buenos Aires: Jesús Menéndez, eds., 1920), 231–56.

⁹⁶ Vélez, in Texo, Juicios críticos, 251.

⁹⁷ His treatment of dowry was quite like that of Andrés Bello and Julián Viso; in all three codes, parents of means were no longer required to endow daughters, as in colonial law, and the dowry lost its special treatment with respect to creditors.

⁹⁸ Cháneton, Historia de Vélez, vol. 2, 188.

⁹⁹ See the essays reproduced in Texo, Juicios críticos.

¹⁰⁰ José Francisco López, “El proyecto de código del Doctor Vélez Sarsfield,” La Tribuna (November 1869), reprinted in Texo, Juicios críticos, 60. His main critique of Vélez's code was for not having adopted civil marriage.

¹⁰¹ Baltomero Llerena, Concordancias y comentarios del Código Civil Argentino, vol. 6 (Buenos Aires: Imp. y Lib. de Mayo, 1889), 386; José Olegario Machado, Exposición y comentario del Código Civil Argentino, vol. 9 (Buenos Aires: Ed. Científica y Literaria Argentina, 1922), 300–15.

¹⁰² Ibid., 301.

¹⁰³ Seone, Historia de la dote, 46–47; Zeberio, “Un código para la nación.”

¹⁰⁴ Guillermo A. Borda, Manual de Sucesiones (Buenos Aires: Ed. Perrot, 1959), 309–10, emphasizes how the exclusion of the surviving spouse from inheriting was a feudal concept, related to landed estates being passed down through the blood line, which was of little relevance in mid-nineteenth-century Argentina. Perrino, Derecho de las Sucesiones, 1435, emphasizes the role of immigration; Schmidt, “Intestate Succession,” 142.

¹⁰⁵ On its population decline, see Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Table 1. According to Zahler, Ambitious Rebels, 40, the long war of independence caused more devastation in Venezuela than elsewhere.

¹⁰⁶ Arlene J. Díaz, Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela, 1786–1904 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 134. This same law, nonetheless, established that if under this age, children could not sue parents for the right to marry whom they chose, a not uncommon occurrence in the late colonial period.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 150–70; Zahler, Ambitious Rebels, 177–85. Zahler considers that the incorporation of such liberal precepts in women's litigation took place earlier in Venezuela than in other parts of the continent.

¹⁰⁸ Mirla Alcibíades, La heroica aventura de construir una república. Familia-nación en el ochocientos venezolano (1830–1865) (Caracas: Monte Ávila Eds., 2004).

¹⁰⁹ Zahler, Ambitious Rebels, 166–67, 176, and Díaz, Female Citizens, 189, converge with Alcibíades on this point. Also see Luis Rincón Rubio, Mujer y honor en Maracaibo a fines del siglo XIX (1880–1900) (Mérida: Universidad de Zulia, 2010).

¹¹⁰ Adriana Hernández, Jurisprudencia, liberalismo, y diplomacia. La vida pública de Julián Viso (1822–1900) (Caracas: Instituto de Altos Estudios Diplomáticos, 1999), 87–97. Viso established his credentials by co-authoring, while still a law student, a commentated code of civil procedures, published in 1851.

¹¹¹ The cover letter is reproduced in Pedro Guzmán, “Introducción. Nota Biográfica, Doctor Julián Viso,” in Proyecto de Código Civil (editado por primera vez en 1854), ed. Julián Viso (San Juan de los Morros: Editorial Caja de Trabajadores Penitenciarios, 1955), iii–xv.

¹¹² Fernando Chumaceiro Chiarelli, Bello y Viso, Codificadores (Estudio comparado del Código Civil de Bello y el Proyecto de Julián Viso) (Caracas, 1981), 334.

¹¹³ Viso, Proyecto de Código Civil, Book II, Title VII, Law 2, art. 1. If there was a legitimate child, a recognized natural child received half their share.

¹¹⁴ On Viso's family background, see Hernández, Jurisprudencia, 1–54.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 96–98.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 103–5; Guzmán Brito, La codificación; Anibal Dominici, Comentarios al Código Civil Venezolano (reformado en 1896). vol. 1 (Caracas: Imprenta Bolivar, 1897).

¹¹⁷ Comisión Revisora, “Código Civil de 1862, Informe de la Comisión Revisora,” reproduced in Revista de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad Católica Andres Bello, 2 (1966), 276.

¹¹⁸ Ibid.; compare this text with García Goyena, Concordancias, 360, cited earlier herein.

¹¹⁹ Deere and León, “Liberalism,” Table 1.

¹²⁰ Amenodoro Rangel Lamus, “El Código Civil de 1873 y sus antecedentes legales,” in Conmemoración del Centenario del Código Civil decretado en Febrero de 1873, ed. Congreso de la República (Caracas: Congreso de la República, 1973), xiv.

¹²¹ Ibid. Viso did not participate in this commission.

¹²² In the Italian code, the spouse was in the 1st order, receiving a share equal to that of a child but only in usufruct. Only in the 3rd order, when they concurred with siblings and natural children, did they received an inheritance share as property; if there were no collateral heirs to the 6th degree, they inherited the full estate. Alberto Aguilera y Velasco, El Código Civil Italiano comentado, concordado y comparado (Madrid: Librería Universal de Córdoba y Cía., 1881), arts. 736–818.

¹²³ Dominici, Comentarios, vol. 1, xiv.

¹²⁴ Ibid, vol. 2 (Caracas: Imprenta Bolivar, 1902), 42.

¹²⁵ Dominici, Comentarios, vol. 1, xiv. In determining inheritance shares, he considered it appropriate only to deduct any assets donated in life by the deceased to the spouse or a child, a rule common to most of these codes.

¹²⁶ Segovia, El código civil, vol. 2, 542.

¹²⁷ While the difference in male and female life expectancies was relatively small in the nineteenth century compared with the gap that would develop in the next, the age gap at marriage was large (although falling), so that it was more likely that wives would outlive their husbands. For example, in 1855 the age gap at marriage in Buenos Aires was 7.5 years, having fallen from 11.4 in 1810; Szuchman, Order, Family and Community, 194.

¹²⁸ Ibid., 311.

¹²⁹ Mariano Yañez, José M. Lafragua, and Isidro Montiel, Proyecto de código civil para el Distrito Federal y Territorio de la Baja-California, formado de orden del Supremo Gobierno, vol. 4 (Mexico, D.F.: Imprenta de Ignacio Cumplido, 1870), 24.

¹³⁰ On the more recent reforms, see Schmidt, “Intestate Succession.”