TEXAS SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

In the life she lived, the exampleshe set, and the body of Castilian law shebequeathed to Texas, Isabella set a precedentand bequeathed a legal legacy of feminineempowerment to future generations. AsJim Haley observed in The Texas SupremeCourt’s Prologue,In England, a woman’sidentity became subsumed in thatof her husband when she married;property that was hers beforemarriage became his; she could notenter into contracts—her stationwas roughly equivalent to that ofa child or a mental incompetent.Under civil law, things were vastlydifferent, as indeed was embodiedby Isabella herself, who as a youngprincess had been so used as a pawnin the games of powerful men thatwhen she married, she refused acrown matrimonial. It was sheherself who chose Ferdinand ofAragon as her husband, insisted ontaking her throne as Ferdinand’sequal in power, and squeezed aprenuptial agreement from him.All these areas of Spanishjurisprudence would come to haveenormous implications for theland we would know as Texas. Itwas Isabella who took the lead inQueen Isabella of Spain, from the painting Isabel la Católica,attributed to Gerard David, ca. 1520, public domain, Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_I_of_Castile#/media/File:Isabel_la_Cat%C3%B3lica-2.jpgoutfitting Columbus’s expedition, and her gamble paid off: his discovery of the New World,and then the successes of the conquistadores, Pizarro in Peru and Cortés in Mexico, made Spainthe dominant power in Europe and opened the floodgates of looted native wealth. Within twogenerations, Spanish cities in the New World had become cultural centers in their own right,with writers and composers, cathedrals and universities, and the complex, arcane system of lawswhose enforcement descended from viceroy down to governor and further down to commandantscivil and military. 11James L. Haley, The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836-1986 (Austin: Univ. of Tex. Press, 2013), 2–3.22