Personas miserables: the legal category that gave Indians privileged standing

The doctrine that placed the Indians among the persons Roman and canon law called miserabiles, and with it a bundle of procedural privileges — the protections of minors and rustics, summary and cheap process, restitution, leniency in criminal causes — plus a royal order that Spaniards who injured an Indian be punished more severely than if they had injured a Spaniard. Its own chief expositor prints both the insulting premise the doctrine rested on and the reason it so often failed.