THE YEAR 2019 will mark half a millennium from the Spanish intrusion into central Mexico. Throughout this region and beyond, the Spaniards encountered a great world civilization, enormously complex and ancient, some small portions of which a few members of their society managed to record, motivated by conventional religious, economic, political, and legal concerns, although often as well by fascination with what they encountered. As the postcontact society and economy changed, more rapidly in some areas than others, asserting and ascertaining the content of precontact Aztec law became a vital concern of Spanish missionaries, colonists, colonial administrators, surviving indigenous elites, and indigenous communities. Although the fate of indigenous law under the new Spanish hegemony is a compelling topic in itself, this article is concerned with recovering the substance and nature of a legal tradition developed in the Americas in isolation from the rest of the world and now forever lost in time. What we can know of this unique tradition, nevertheless, remains of interest to millions of contemporary Nahuatl speakers in Mexico as well as to Mesoamerican researchers and all scholars interested in comparative legal systems.

In the 1980s, I published a monograph and a series of articles on Aztec law, concentrating on the city and small empire of Texcoco, where documentation on precontact law was most plentiful. Although I was careful to communicate the dynamism, factional disputes, and change in the Texcocan system in these works, I reemphasized these aspects in an article in 1993 on inter-state and intra-familial killing as vigorously pursued by the elite in Aztec societies. Although Mesoamerican studies have continued to develop in the past two decades, no other investigator primarily interested in precontact Aztec law has emerged, with the exception of Carlos Brokmann Haro. In almost all other instances, Aztec law continues to be mentioned only in decontextualized fragments. Meanwhile, some investigators (such as Frederic Hicks and Pedro Carrasco) have persisted in declaring what the content of Aztec law must have been as determined by their own Marxist and Polanyist ideologies, especially with regard to land tenure and political structure. Other investigators have taken an empirical approach to the available data, revealing the nuances and complexities found in reality.