Definition
An auto acordado (Spanish: "agreed order" or "accorded decree") is, in Spanish colonial law, an order or ruling emanating from a superior tribunal and promulgated in the name and by the authority of the sovereign. It functioned as a quasi-legislative instrument issued by high courts — most notably the audiencias and, later, the Consejo de Indias — that carried the binding force of royal command without originating directly from the crown itself. The issuing tribunal acted as a delegated voice of sovereign authority, and its orders governed judicial procedure, administrative conduct, and matters of public order within the colonial territories.
In modern Chilean constitutional law, the term survives and retains practical significance: the Supreme Court of Chile retains constitutional authority to issue autos acordados as internal regulatory decrees governing court procedure and judicial administration, a power recognized in the Chilean Constitution and subject to review by the Constitutional Tribunal.
Common Confusion
Auto acordado is occasionally confused with real cédula (royal decree issued directly by the crown) or real provisión (a formal royal writ). The distinction matters for historical research: a real cédula expressed the direct will of the monarch, while an auto acordado expressed the will of a superior tribunal acting under delegated sovereign authority. The source of the instrument — crown versus court — determined its formal status in the colonial hierarchy, even when both carried obligatory force.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Spanish colonial legal history will encounter auto acordado in sources spanning the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, primarily in the records of the audiencias of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and other viceregal jurisdictions. Several navigational points deserve attention.
First, the term's administrative scope was broad. Autos acordados were not limited to judicial decisions in the narrow sense — they regulated court fees, procedural rules, ceremonial precedence, and governance of local populations. A researcher must resist treating them as equivalent to modern judicial opinions.
Second, the Chilean constitutional survival of the term creates a significant anachronism trap in modern sources. A researcher encountering "auto acordado" in a twentieth or twenty-first century Latin American legal text is almost certainly reading about Chilean constitutional practice, not Spanish colonial law. The two uses share institutional lineage but operate in entirely different legal frameworks.
Third, the historical dictionary record is thin. All three source dictionaries reproduce essentially the same one-sentence definition, tracing to Schmidt's Civil Law, p. 93. This uniformity signals that Anglo-American legal lexicography never developed independent analysis of the term — the dictionaries passed a single secondary source forward without elaboration. Researchers needing substantive treatment should move quickly to Spanish-language primary sources and to scholarship on the audiencia system.
Fourth, the Consejo de Indias context is important. The Council of the Indies in Madrid also issued autos acordados that functioned as general legislation for the colonial territories. These were collected in the Recopilación de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias (1680), making that compilation a key primary source for researchers tracing the normative content of specific orders.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary offer identical one-sentence definitions, all citing Schmidt's Civil Law, page 93. No source elaborates beyond this. Burrill appends the entry immediately before the Greek term Αυτοκράτωρ (emperor), the juxtaposition underscoring the sovereign-delegation logic embedded in the term — autos acordados derived their authority from the emperor-equivalent figure of the Spanish monarch, filtered through a superior court.
The shared dependence on a single secondary citation (Schmidt) reflects the limited penetration of Spanish colonial law into nineteenth-century Anglo-American legal lexicography. Black's and Burrill treat the term as a curiosity of foreign law rather than a working concept requiring analytical development. Researchers should treat these dictionary entries as entry points only, not as reliable guides to the full institutional role of the auto acordado.
Jurisdictional Note
In historical context, auto acordado operated across all territories under Spanish colonial jurisdiction. In contemporary practice, the term is most significant in Chile, where autos acordados issued by the Supreme Court have constitutional status and have been subject to challenge before the Tribunal Constitucional de Chile. Other Latin American jurisdictions do not preserve the term in active constitutional or procedural use to the same degree.