The years following, well-described by Schafer, saw yet another bifurcation of Louisiana law or, perhaps more accurately, a cascade of bifurcations. The French interregnum before Napoleon's cession of Louisiana to the United States lasted only three weeks (November 30 to December 20, 1803), but in those twenty-one days, the French Prefect (Laussat) found time to reenact that Code.
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This traditional jurisprudence did not prevail in cases appealed or removed to New Orleans, but it helped keep alive the memory of French law, including the Code Noir. It was quite different, however, at the posts, where Francophone commandants dispensed their variants of justice to Francophone colonists. As I hope to have shown elsewhere, the law of Castile and of the Indies then prevailed, in the Spanish language and in Spanish tribunals advised by a genuine Spanish lawyer, in New Orleans. Once again, however, there was a bifurcation of the legal system. It seems no longer open to dispute that officially, at any rate, and as administered in and from New Orleans, the law of Castile and of the Indies replaced the ancien droit of France in the Spanish ultramarine Province of Louisiana from Novemto November 30, 1803. As has been shown elsewhere, however, and as is now more fully documented in Hanger's work, Spanish slave law soon thereafter replaced the Code Noir in Spanish Louisiana.
That Code, we now know, was put into effect in French Louisiana in March 1724, and on August 27, 1769, General O'Reilly expressly confirmed its continuing effectiveness in the initial, transitory period of direct Spanish rule. Professor Palmer has discussed a variant of the dichotomy last mentioned by tracing the pre-history of the Code Noir of French Louisiana. Did French or Spanish elements predominate in the Civil Code (or Digest) of 1808? Was the ancien droit of France displaced by the law of Castile and of the Indies between 17, and if so, where and to what extent? And to take up another theme: To what extent did the civil-law component of Louisiana law at any given time reflect Roman law rather than the Custom of Paris or Castilian law? But the moorings and origins of Louisiana's civil-law tradition are also contested between friendly and not-so-friendly twins. The present legal system itself is hybrid, consisting of civil-law and common-law elements, and every twenty years or so, there is a heated debate about whether Louisiana is more of a civil-law than a common-law jurisdiction, or vice versa. Louisiana has escaped the bifurcation of its private law into law and equity, but everything else in Louisiana law and legal history seems to be viewed in pairs of competing, hostile, or mutually exclusive categories.
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