El español es el segundo idioma más hablado en el mundo. Un número creciente de personas en los Estados Unidos y en otros países son conocedores de este idioma y además lo utilizan profesionalmente en el ámbito jurídico. No obstante, a muchos de ellos les gustaría mejorar su comprensión idiomática y jurídica del mismo. En la actualidad existen pocos recursos didácticos y profesionales a los que recurrir. El derecho en español: Terminología y habilidades jurídicas para un ejercicio legal exitoso es el único libro actualmente en el mercado que ofrece al mismo tiempo instrucción avanzada en español jurídico e información selecta sobre los marcos legales contemporáneos en los que este idioma se utiliza.

Este libro monolingüe en español puede ser utilizado en el aula y también como herramienta de auto-aprendizaje por parte de universitarios y profesionales que posean un nivel intermedio de conocimiento del idioma. El libro contiene diez lecciones, cada una de ellas dedicada a un área clave del derecho: constitucional, contratos, actividades bancarias, penal, familia, inmigración, derechos humanos, litigios internacionales y arbitraje. Todas estas lecciones presentan un vocabulario escogido sobre el tema jurídico abordado en ellas, y después ofrecen una serie de ejercicios basados en documentos jurídicos reales procedentes de diversos países de habla hispana. El último capítulo es una guía para facilitar la comprensión de varias películas que contienen interesantes cuestiones legales y que pueden ser utilizadas para el análisis contextual de los temas abordados en las lecciones precedentes. A través de todos estos materiales de capacitación, los lectores aprenderán a utilizar el vocabulario español jurídico en su contexto operativo adecuado, y podrán entender las diferencias lingüísticas y conceptuales entre los distintos países de América Latina y España. Al mismo tiempo se familiarizarán con las disposiciones y los documentos más utilizados en la práctica jurídica en español. Finalmente, también podrán mejorar sus habilidades de escucha y de redacción jurídica.

In 1654, England’s Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell conceived a plan of breathtaking ambition: the conquest of Spain’s vast American empire. As the first phase of his Western Design, a large expedition sailed to the West Indies, under secret orders to take Spanish colonies. The English Conquest of Jamaica presents entrenched imperial fantasies confronting Caribbean realities. It captures the moment when the revolutionary English state first became a major player in the Atlantic arena.

Although capturing Jamaica was supposed to be only the first step in Cromwell’s scheme, even that relatively modest acquisition proved difficult. The English badly underestimated the myriad challenges they faced, starting with the unexpectedly fierce resistance offered by the Spanish and other residents who tenaciously defended their island. After sixteen long years Spain surrendered Jamaica and acceded to an English presence in the Americas in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. But by then, other goals—including profit through commerce rather than further conquest—had superseded the vision behind the Western Design.

Carla Gardina Pestana situates Cromwell’s imperial project in the context of an emerging Atlantic empire as well as the religious strife and civil wars that defined seventeenth-century England. Though falling short of its goal, Cromwell’s plan nevertheless reshaped England’s Atlantic endeavors and the Caribbean region as a whole. Long before sugar and slaves made Jamaica Britain’s most valuable colony, its acquisition sparked conflicts with other European powers, opened vast tropical spaces to exploitation by the purportedly industrious English, and altered England’s engagement with the wider world.

To address this oversight, Loureiro draws from his own experiences as well as from a wide range of previous theoretical works on autobiography, especially from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that the self does not begin as a self-positing consciousness but as a response to an address from the other. On this basis, Loureiro then brilliantly traces the complex interplays between the political, discursive, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of autobiography.

After laying out these theoretical foundations, Loureiro puts them to work in analyzing four of the most fascinating autobiographies written by Spanish exiles: The Life of Joseph Blanco White, who lived from 1775 to 1841, Memoria de la Melancolia by Maria Teresa Leon (1904-1988), Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa by Juan Goytisolo (born 1931), and Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (born 1923). The lives of these authors, all of whom were exiled for political reasons, were disrupted by some of the most crucial events in Spain's tortuous road to modernity and democracy.

The book closes with a discussion of why there have been so few critical examinations of autobiographies written in modern Spain. Loureiro proposes that, even in today's Spain, stifling social and political forces smother ethical responsibility, which is an essential ingredient in creating autobiographies that dare to be more than a humdrum inventory of personal recollections. Only in exile have Spanish authors seemed able to find the conditions to write their lives in a truly responsible manner. This answer to a call that grounds the subject in an other is ultimately the only form of truth available in autobiography.

At the end of the Spanish civil war, Mexico was the only country to offer open refuge to the thousands of Republican emigrés who fled from Spain in 1939–1940. Exiles and Citizens is a study of these political exiles, especially those with intellectual and professional backgrounds and ambitions. It focuses on their adjustment to Mexico, on their continued ties to Spain, and on their impact on Mexican development.

The critical dilemma faced by the Spanish exiles was that, despite having fought for their political and social ideals in Spain, they forfeited in exile their active role in Spanish history. In Mexico they found a political and social system that seemed to include many of the ideals that had inspired the Spanish Republic; moreover, they were able to incorporate themselves economically, professionally, and intellectually into Mexican national life. Yet, because they were not native-born citizens, they had little or no creative part to play in the politics of their adopted country.

For Mexico, the impact of the refugees from Spain was enormous. Integrated from the first into nearly all intellectual, professional, and cultural fields, their skills proved an important catalyst to Mexican development. Yet, outside these fields, Mexico was never an effective "melting pot." The Republicans themselves were divided in their loyalties, and the Mexicans, from the beginning, were reluctant to encourage the full participation of their guests in national affairs.

Two goals were shared by most of the exiles: to ensure that the world would remember the liberal, creative, and open Spain they had created and thus reject Franco; to show their gratitude by working for the benefit and progress of Mexico. These goals, although frequently contradictory, sustained the emigration and gave meaning to exile. The refugees tried to maintain their identity by coming together in formal and informal associations that were intended either to act on behalf of the homeland or to re-create the Spanish Republican structures and values in exile. To maintain a Spanish identity, however, proved difficult, and for the second and third generations in Mexico, the initial goals had already lost their meaning. For them, economic and professional, as well as familial, ties were strongly Mexican.

Spanish Republicans in Mexico represented a fairly rare phenomenon: a large group of skilled, relatively well educated immigrants to a country where persons of their attainments and status were not numerous. Moreover, as political exiles, they approached the problems of acculturation differently from economic emigrants. Patricia Fagen's study thus offers a further understanding of an important exile community and the characteristics that set it apart from other examples of immigrant experiences. In addition, the study sheds new light on the intellectual history of Mexico and the far-reaching effects of the Spanish civil war.

As Spain colonized the Americas during the sixteenth century, Spanish soldiers, bureaucrats, merchants, adventurers, physicians, ship pilots, and friars explored the natural world, gathered data, drew maps, and sent home specimens of America's vast resources of animals, plants, and minerals. This amassing of empirical knowledge about Spain's American possessions had two far-reaching effects. It overturned the medieval understanding of nature derived from Classical texts and helped initiate the modern scientific revolution. And it allowed Spain to commodify and control the natural resources upon which it built its American empire.

In this book, Antonio Barrera-Osorio investigates how Spain's need for accurate information about its American colonies gave rise to empirical scientific practices and their institutionalization, which, he asserts, was Spain's chief contribution to the early scientific revolution. He also conclusively links empiricism to empire-building as he focuses on five areas of Spanish activity in America: the search for commodities in, and the ecological transformation of, the New World; the institutionalization of navigational and information-gathering practices at the Spanish Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade); the development of instruments and technologies for exploiting the natural resources of the Americas; the use of reports and questionnaires for gathering information; and the writing of natural histories about the Americas.