Felix Cohen and the Spanish Origin of Indian Rights

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the influence of colonial Latin American jurisprudence on New Deal lawyer and expert on federal Indian law, Felix Cohen. I will do so by outlining the major sixteenth-century debates about indigenous rights upon which Cohen capitalizes, as well as the manner in which Spanish thinkers like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas weave in and out of his writings. The case of Felix Cohen suggests to us that in order to understand complex phenomena like federal Indian policy we must cast our nets wide, following intellectual trajectories into unexpected corners of the past.