Lerdo law

Drafted by Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, it was signed on 25 June 1856 by President Ignacio Comonfort, but its language was ambiguous, needing subsequent clarifications.

[4] It was one of the Reform Laws, which sought to establish the separation of church and state, the abolition of ecclesiastical privileges (fueros); and the secularization of registration of births, deaths, and marriages, which gave rise to the Civil Registry.

During the Bourbon Reforms, the Spanish monarchy sought to undermine the power of the Church, especially the Society of Jesus, and so it expelled the Jesuits, confiscated their highly productive landed estates, and sold them to private individuals.

After independence in 1821, the ecclesiastical right to hold real estate was challenged in the 1830s during the vice-presidency of Valentín Gómez Farías, who implemented the secularization of Franciscan missions in California.

As stipulated in Article 8 of the law, the properties were exempt from the alienation if the buildings used immediately and directly in the service of Church institutions, such as convents, episcopal palaces, municipal schools, hospitals, hospices], markets, and houses of correction charities.

The law required that civil corporations to be stripped of their real estate and so seriously damaged the foundation of the economy of indigenous communities, which owned all of the land in their boundaries.