Despite geopolitical pressures toward harmonization, Latin American countries enjoy a long history of legal innovation. Yet these local legal differences – when considered at all – mostly figure as diagnoses of legal underdevelopment. In addition to making heterodox laws and legal institutions better known in the legal literature, the structural bias against their recognition must be frontally addressed. This chapter contributes to that work by challenging one of the main elements of this hierarchical arrangement: specifically, legal informality as a marker of underdevelopment. The chapter first examines the notion of legal heterodoxy itself and introduces the theory of heterodox legal informality as Latin America’s pre-eminent contribution to modern law. In a number of legal domains in Latin America, the locus of informality is – or has been –simply different from where global hegemonic models prescribe. It then examines two instances of heterodoxy in private law in Latin America: (i) its previous model of selective secured lending, which has been largely replaced by the liberalizing approach to secured transactions modeled after the US Uniform Commercial Code; and (ii) the innovative property law regime within the context of private law transitional justice in Colombia.
