This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is our American stories, and as you know, we tell stories about everything here on this show.

And some of our favorite stories, well, they're about history.

And today, Faith brings us some law history from the state of Texas.

Take it away, Faith.

If you have traveled much to Europe or any other country outside the U.S.,

you will see history dates from times like the 12th and 13th century,

and it soon becomes clear that America is actually a quite young country in comparison.

With that being said, we owe much of our jurisprudence, that is, our law systems, to other

countries and the people that came from them to the U.S.

While the U.S. adopted English common law when becoming its own country, Texas was a bit

different when they became a state because of the Spanish influence they had.

Two of the laws that the Spanish brought over to Texas greatly impacted women's rights

and freedoms. There was a time, unfortunately, not terribly

long ago in our history, that women could not own property or have any money of their own.

If their husband had debts to pay or owed taxes, the family's home could be seized and taken,

leaving the wife and children homeless and helpless.

To keep this from happening, the Spanish had brought with them their homestead exemption laws.

To help us unpack this long history of homestead laws, we have Dr. Jean Stuntz, a professor

at West Texas A&M University.

It starts back in Spain at the fall of the Roman Empire.

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