Standing at the intersection between constitutionalism and independence, the article aims to discuss the institutional dynamics of justice in the framing of the Empire of Brazil as part of a shared legal tradition throughout the Ibero-American world, focusing on the cycle of changes occurred between the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For that, the enfasis is in the guarantees of justice, which, once embedded in the culture of ius commune, would be central to the new states in America through the statization of elements that ensured the operation of an old key: that the "good administration of justice" relied on "the good judge", and his straight behavior, not on the laws and their proper application. From the prevalence of a "justice of judges", the conclusion is that, without codes in the modern sense, it was impossible to implement a "legal justice" regimen.
Justice; constitution; tradition; institutions; Ibero-America