This article centers on the materiality of Indigenous legal interactions with the viceroy in the special colonial court, the Juzgado General de Naturales, which was located, at least ostensibly, inside the viceregal palace in Mexico City. The partial destruction of the palace during a riot in 1692—a year that roughly bisected Spanish colonial rule in Mexico— serves as a focal point for exploring the dynamic history of personal encounters and physical space in the viceregal jurisdiction from the court's founding in the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth century. It surveys the architectural features of the palace, traces the viceroys’ disappearance from audiences with Indigenous subjects at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and charts native petitioners’ own growing reliance on proxies and papers rather than appearances in the court. By focusing on physical presence within the Juzgado’s operation, the court reveals itself as a space of absence and abstraction as much as pomp and procedure.

The process of law enforcement helped to shape the state in the Middle Ages. This article uses an extensive array of court records to provide the first detailed account of royal efforts to police the illegal export of wool in mid-fourteenth century England, when the wool trade was subjected to unprecedented levels of taxation and discussed in moral, as well as fiscal, terms. It shows that these efforts remained heavily centralized in terms of both personnel and institutional form when many other areas of royal law enforcement were becoming increasingly devolved. The article then situates this centralized enforcement form within contemporary criticisms of royal taxation, the place of the royal courts in the wider legal geography of commercial regulation, and the localized dynamic underpinning many legal processes. It argues that the enforcement process was shaped and, indeed, blunted by a critical debate over the extent of royal power and its place within England’s “moral economy.” By situating the regulation of the wool trade in this series of regulatory and economic contexts at a particularly important moment in the development of the late medieval tax state, this article reveals wool smuggling to be a subject of wider significance to historians interested in the nature and—particularly—the limits of royal power and royal law in medieval England.

This article discusses an important aspect of the law relating to theft in thirteenth-century England, and one of the ways in which that law developed. Central to it is the argument that the treatise The Mirror of Justices and references in court records and reports show that a short statute enacted early in the reign of Edward I, probably in 1278, categorically defined 12d. as the amount, whether in goods or money, at which larceny became a capital felony, incurring judgment of death. As well as setting out the evidence for this hitherto overlooked ordinance, the article also argues that the statute can be associated with some significant developments in the way petty theft was treated subsequently. In particular it had the effect of promoting the development of penal imprisonment, while since the task of valuation was given to trial juries, it further enhanced the leading role of the latter in determining the fates of the men and women whose lives depended on their verdicts.

Northern Brazil experienced consequential socio-economic and legal transformation by the mid-eighteenth century in the context of imperial reforms. If the region relied for decades on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans, the Portuguese crown banned the practiced in 1755. To develop a plantation economy, the monarchy created a trading company responsible for shipping unprecedented number of enslaved Africans. This article discusses ruptures and continuities on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans. It focuses on one city, São Luís, and makes extensive use of Catholic sources (baptisms and marriages), notarial records, and legal cases. The article analyzes the connection between mechanisms that allowed the resilience of slavery (or forms that resembled slavery) and attempts to claim and preserve freedom or autonomy, in this case the strategic use of the índio status. The article develops two of those mechanisms: social dependencies created within the households and the use of socio-racial classifications by the colonial society. I make two interconnected arguments. First, I propose a bottom-up process of Indigenous slavery abolition. Indigenous workers were savvy litigants and they fought for their place as mobile wage laborers within the city. Second, in that moment of socio-economic and legal transformations, slaveholders developed vernacular practices stressing black maternal origins to slaves.

This article, part of the forum “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal Spaces,” analyzes how Spanish law intersected with longue-durée Indigenous histories to pattern performative judicial violence in disputes over boundary lands separating Indigenous communities. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when population growth and expansion and commercialization of the livestock industry put pressure on Indigenous lands, Native judicial officers used their coercive power and symbols of judicial authority to physically enter boundary lands and shape the course of legal disputes. By combining legal and extralegal procedures, Native officials developed customary patterns of judicial practice and performance proper to their own jurisdiction in which objects invested with political, sacred, and quotidian meaning figured centrally. Staffs of office and whips wielded by Native authorities as emblems of Indian administrative and legal jurisdiction represented one category of the everyday materials of law. Clothing, farming implements, and livestock afforded other tools with which Indigenous farmers and authorities made legal claims. When reading land disputes alongside criminal cases of land invasions across Oaxaca’s judicial archives, it becomes clear that Native officials and farmers used these objects to struggle over territory and authority in cycles of litigation, land titling or contracts of joint-possession, and violence that often endured for decades or centuries, forming an enduring facet of agrarian custom in the region.

In this article four photographs of mixed law courts (landraad) in nineteenth-century colonial Indonesia are approached as a window to study the materiality and meaning of cloth in courtrooms. The photos grant access to a careful colonial curation as well as complex Javanese hierarchies that were translated onto and through cloth, and its colors and patterns. Batik sarongs, tablecloths, head scarves, robes and gowns, coats and turbans reveal a courtroom of semiotic richness and plurality where different actors were signaling different messages to multiple audiences. This emphasis on cloth contributes to an emergent and rich discussion on the importance of objects in the study of law and empire, that has primarily focused on the materiality of paper and other objects of lawmaking. In the mixed court of the landraad, it was cloth that spoke louder than words and paper. This article emphasizes that in a mixed court the display of a plural world and jurisdictional layering, complicating the binary between direct and indirect colonial rule, was more important than a monolithic reflection of state law. Cloth was crucial to the display of this plural world and used as a way to impose, maintain, alter, insert oneself in or resist colonial rule.

In 2021, Anna Lvovsky published Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall with the University of Chicago Press. The book studies gay communities’ confrontations with criminal law in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Lvovsky, a professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University, pays particularly close attention to law enforcement practices that aimed to police homosexuality, as well as “the gay world's confrontations with the law.” What results is a complex story of regulation and contestation that spans several decades, which is poised to not only influence how historians understand the policing of sexual difference, but also push forward understandings of the United States war on crime and the inter-related rise of the carceral state.

Ample scholarship from Foucault onward has probed the origins of prisons as a key technology for modern state control, but overemphasizes the revolutionary era as a moment of invention. The prison existed much earlier and, as this research demonstrates, gradually became a favored tool among many widely-utilized alternatives. Other historians have explored early modern strategies such as exile, used most often to punish recalcitrant subjects when other strategies did not work. This evidence points to a general pattern whereby these forms of control coexisted and even overlapped in an array of punitive options. I theorize coercive strategies as existing together within a “punitive matrix,” in which imprisonment operated as one among many methods of state control, alongside others such as galley labor, banishment, and corporal punishment. Beginning with evidence from Saint-Domingue in the first half of the eighteenth century about prisons, building out from Jean Clavier’s Léogane in the 1740s. It then turns to the archival sources themselves to understand how colonial administrators described prisons. Read together, this evidence highlights the limited power of prisons, and imprisonment, to control imperial subjects, while elucidating some of the pathways chosen by those subjects.

In the fall of 1989, the queer community became embroiled in a fierce debate over whether to press for marriage rights. Two attorneys from Lambda Legal, a leading gay and lesbian rights organization, set out the competing considerations in the pages of Out/Look, a community magazine. Tom Stoddard, the then-executive director, argued that the movement should prioritize marriage rights because that strategy provided the surest path to equality. Paula Ettelbrick, Lambda's Legal Director, disagreed. She conceded that marriage provided “the ultimate form of acceptance” and “an insider status of the most powerful kind.” That fact, however, was the problem. Gays and lesbians, she argued, should not be focused on assimilating to the mainstream, but rather should pursue justice for those who were different.

This essay explores the making of maritime boundaries in the Bay of Bengal in the northern Indian Ocean, emphasizing the role of visualizations in establishing states' jurisdictional claims to unstable coasts and ephemeral islands. These include colonial-era revenue surveys of the Sunderbans, sketches of land formation in the Godavari delta appended to case papers in litigations, nautical charts and inspection reports of the seabed in the Gulf of Mannar, maps drawn at the time of partitioning the subcontinent in South Asia and satellite imagery of the Bay's littoral. These visualizations are the everyday materials that delineate sea space in law, as judges, lawyers and states navigate fluidity and fixity, accuracy and equity in international law.

Just a stone's throw from the campus of the university in Kingston, Ontario, where I teach, is a small park. Hugging a rocky stretch of Lake Ontario shoreline, Macdonald Park, named after Canada's first prime minister, is better known by locals as “Pervert Park.” Since at least World War II, Pervert Park has been the primary cruising ground in Kingston for men searching for sex with other men, a meeting place for a mix of mostly working-class men, men stationed at the nearby military base, and the occasional intrepid university student. For women, the park's name references a different kind of pervert and signals the potential danger of walking alone in the park at night. Two of the park's main features are the Newlands Pavilion, a bandstand built in 1896, and the Richardson bathhouse, which is really a public washroom and changing facility, and which, when it first opened in 1919, boasted lockers, hot-water showers, and a list of “rules that would be enforced to maintain decorum in the bathing house.” A paved path, punctuated by park benches, connects the pavilion and bathhouse, which, after dark, conveniently becomes an oval track for men cruising around and sometimes having sex behind the pavilion and bathhouse.