ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the content of the Very Brief Account as a juridically based text and Las Casas’s discernible legal propensity in the treatise’s structure and narrative style, in its epistemological rationale, and in its analytic framework. In addition to employing the four legal forms of structuring a treatise, Las Casas utilized the oldest form of juristic writing—the epitome—as well as argument by analogy, and various other juridical elements. His epistemological law-based rationale, derived from the ecclesial juridical tradition, pertained to divine providence’s plan and governance of the world in accord with eternal, divine, natural, and human laws. This chapter focuses on the tripartite scheme of law, which belonged to the genres of Thomism and scholasticism, to demonstrate that, how, and where Las Casas applied these laws and the meta-narrative of providence. This study then goes beyond current scholarship to demonstrate that Las Casas’s purposive analytic framework was based on considerations of divine, natural, and human laws, which are then explicated by an analysis of the juridical figure of tyranny and its three spheres, viz., political, moral, and theological. This chapter concludes by elucidating three interlocking dimensions of Thomistic and canonistic understandings of justice to which Las Casas subscribed.
