The magistrate Jesús Gerardo Sotomayor, corresponding academician for Mexico of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), has donated to the Library of the Academy the book “El Poder Judicial en el Estado de Coahuila de Zaragoza. Estatal y Federal” (The Judicial Power in the State of Coahuila de Zaragoza. State and Federal), which he has just published in his country and which is added to his numerous specialized monographs in Advocacy and Criminal and Civil Law. The book covers a bibliographic vacuum on institutions closely linked to the history of this Mexican State.
The work traces the history and defines in a didactic way the judicial organization in Mexico and in Coahuila, stopping in the courts of first instance, the judicial districts, the oral courts, the specialized courts, the district courts, the administrative organs, the Federal Judicial Power and the different jurisdictional bodies of Coahuila.
“The research we present is mainly based on documents that fortunately have been preserved in the archives of the State Congress, where we located agreements and decrees that contained the institutional life of the State Judicial Branch, as are the local political constitutions, promulgated from the one of 1827, to the one in force of 1918, duly reformed and added, the first legal ordinances that regulated the Judicial Power, as well as laws, codes and decrees with content related to the institutions of this work”, explains Sotomayor himself in the prologue of the book.
The academician treasures a long career as a lawyer, teacher and researcher. He was director of the Faculty of Law of the Autonomous University of Coahuila and established the first postgraduate studies in Law in Coahuila and Durango. After a long career as head of various courts, he is currently a magistrate of the Superior Court of Justice of the State of Coahuila.
