Definition
A resolucion (also rendered resolución) was a formal opinion or ruling issued by a superior governmental or administrative authority in the Spanish colonial legal system. When a matter was referred upward for decision — typically because a lower authority lacked jurisdiction, precedent, or the institutional standing to resolve it — the superior body would form and issue a resolucion, which was then transmitted back down to the referring or subordinate authority as binding instruction. The resolucion functioned simultaneously as a decisional opinion and as an administrative directive: it resolved the referred question and governed how inferior authorities were to act going forward.
The term belongs to the administrative law vocabulary of Spanish colonial governance, not to common law. It has no direct equivalent in the English legal tradition, though it bears a family resemblance to opinions issued by attorney general offices, advisory rulings from superior courts, or rescript procedures in civil law systems.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Resolución (Spanish) — a resolution, decision, or determination; the act of resolving something; in formal contexts, an official decision or ruling.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry for resolucion specifically; "resolution" is defined as the act of resolving or determining; a settled purpose; a formal expression of opinion by a legislative body.
The ordinary Spanish meaning of resolución — a decision or resolution — overlaps with the legal term but does not capture its specific colonial administrative function. In common usage, a resolution can be made by any deliberating body. In Spanish colonial law, a resolucion was a particular species of downward-directed ruling within a hierarchical administrative chain: it carried not merely an opinion, but governmental authority binding on the inferior offices that received it.
Common Confusion
Resolucion should not be confused with a general legislative resolution (as the term is used in modern parliamentary or statutory contexts) or with a judicial opinion in the common law sense. A resolucion was neither purely legislative nor purely judicial — it was an administrative-decisional instrument peculiar to the bureaucratic structure of Spanish colonial governance. Researchers encountering the term in documents from Spanish colonial territories (including parts of what is now the American Southwest, Florida, Louisiana, the Philippines, and Latin America) should treat it as an administrative referral-and-response mechanism, not as a statute, court opinion, or deliberative resolution.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in sources touching Spanish colonial administration, and its relevance in the Law Mind corpus is concentrated in materials concerning: (1) Spanish colonial governance and its administrative hierarchy; (2) property, land grant, and title disputes in territories formerly under Spanish control; and (3) the reception of Spanish law in American jurisdictions, particularly in the post-1848 period following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and in Florida following the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819.
Researchers working on land title chains in Texas, New Mexico, California, Florida, or Puerto Rico may encounter resoluciones as part of the evidentiary record — documents establishing what a colonial authority decided on a referred question. Their legal weight in American proceedings depended on how individual courts treated the reception of Spanish law, which varied considerably by jurisdiction and era.
The term is easy to overlook or misread in historical documents because it appears in Spanish-language originals, and translators sometimes rendered it generically as "resolution" or "opinion," obscuring its specific administrative character. When accuracy matters — as in land grant litigation — the distinction between a resolucion (a superior authority's binding instruction to an inferior) and a mere administrative note or internal memorandum is legally significant.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in full agreement on the definition, and all three entries trace to the same source: Schmidt's Civil Law (Schm. Civil Law, 93, note 1). This convergence means the historical record on this term is narrow — all three dictionaries are drawing from a single reference rather than from independent sources. Researchers should be cautious about treating the unanimity as reflecting broad secondary authority; it reflects a single scholarly source propagated across the major legal dictionaries of the period.
None of the historical dictionary entries address the procedural mechanism that triggered a resolucion (i.e., what made a matter referable upward), nor do they describe what types of superior authorities issued them or how they were recorded and archived. Those gaps matter for primary source research in colonial archives.
Jurisdictional Note
The resolucion as a legal instrument belongs to the Spanish colonial legal tradition and has no living counterpart in any current American jurisdiction. Its significance in U.S. legal research is historical, arising primarily in states and territories with Spanish colonial heritage. Courts in those jurisdictions developed varying approaches to the evidentiary and legal weight of colonial-era Spanish administrative documents.