The power struggle between debtors and creditors in the 1860s and 1870s signalled a time when face-to-face economic relationships showed signs of strain. Economic life was expanding in more impersonal ways, and debt litigation was increasing as debtors and creditors alike found themselves navigating risk without the long-standing close social ties that once characterised their relationships. Chapter 2 studies legal conflicts and legal codes to understand the risks people took when making contractual agreements and illuminates how they decided to trust each other. It shows debtors attempting to evade their obligations in myriad ways and depicts creditors transmitting their anxieties to the courts through the use of providencias precautorias (precautionary petitions) to sequester goods or people before the initiation of a formal civil suit. Examining legal codes from mediaeval Iberia to nineteenth-century civil law, this chapters shows how jurists, working in a long tradition, attempted to balance the interests of both parties. Although creditors generally prevailed in legal conflicts, the prospects of debtors were on the rise.

The chapter provides an analytical survey of the development of wardship in England from 1066 to 1540, when the Court of Wards was placed on a legislative establishment. In so doing, the chapter performs two roles. Firstly, it provides a detailed introduction to the institution of wardship. Secondly, it explains how the Crown wrought seismic and profoundly unsettling changes in the English land law, especially during the 1530s. In conjunction with the largest forcible re-distribution of land since the Conquest, that is the dissolution of the monasteries, this significantly increased the number of heirs falling into wardship.

The Court dealt with a surprisingly wide variety of cases and for a period, certainly under the Mastership of Lord Burghley (1561–98), usually did so in a tolerably even-handed, equitable, manner. Under the Stuarts, however, as they increasingly sought to maximise their revenues from wardship, so the Court’s legal functions were suborned to its fiscal functions – local juries were strong-armed into finding tenures beneficial to the Crown and producing wardships; previous legal precedent was jettisoned where it was found convenient to do so.

The Introduction examines the emergence and development of law and literature as an interdisciplinary field, while highlighting the ways in which eighteenth-century studies has contributed to and been shaped by the enterprise. Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have examined numerous connections between the era’s legal and literary discourses, emphasizing the formal complexities of both legal and literary texts. The chapters in this volume build upon and extend this body of work, taking up topics including the nature of legal and literary interpretation, the role of legal rhetoric in Britain’s industrial economy, the desire for and resistance to law during public health crises, the regulation of the legal profession, the emergence of the modern judicial decision, the place of law in Britain’s expanding empire, and the role of law in maintaining and rectifying gendered, racial, religious, and class-based inequalities. The Introduction presents an overview of these case studies, reflects on themes running through the volume, and offers suggestions for future work in the field.

Chapter Five presents historical analysis to establish two key points that lay a foundation for the normative argument presented in Chapter Six. First, throughout the nineteenth century, federal courts applied a system of weak judicial review in which they enforced treaty-based rules to protect individual rights from government infringement. Therefore, the type of weak review system I am proposing in Chapter Six has deep historical roots in American public law. Second, due to a largely invisible constitutional transformation that occurred between 1945 and 1965, international human rights treaties are not currently available to U.S. courts as a source of judicially enforceable rights. However, under current constitutional understandings, Congress has the power to make human rights treaties judicially enforceable by enacting an appropriate statute to that effect.

With its supporting materials and explanatory footnotes added to the transcribed narrative, The History of Mary Prince resembles a bundle of legal documents. This was no accident: Thomas Pringle sought to intervene in the public debate about Caribbean slavery by publishing a trustworthy, firsthand account of its horrors. Yet the relationship of The History to legal matters was not only metaphorical, and two legal suits followed its publication, both for libel. The first was brought by Pringle himself in response to an attack in print by James MacQueen, a trenchant defender of British slavery. The second suit was brought by Prince’s former enslaver John Adams Wood, who claimed that Pringle had libeled him in the first place in The History. Prince appeared as a witness in both trials, and her testimony during the second trial provides an additional source of information about her life. With extracts from The History and MacQueen’s article read aloud in both trials, the court thus became a significant site for Prince and the continuing “trials” that she faced during her life.

This chapter deals with a market arrangement at a moment of uncertainty and concern around its continued existence. This arrangement is what I call the impersonal price, or a system of impersonal retail prices, elsewhere also referred to as a system of fixed prices. These phrases describe markets where prices are visible, homogeneous across customers, and non-negotiable. As the chapter shows, impersonal retail prices did not just happen. They are the product of complex interactions between legal regulation, material-technical arrangements, and economic theories, as mobilized in different historical contexts to different socio-political and economic ends.

Chapter 6 is a history of emancipation in New York that stresses the combined importance of economic and legal pressures on slavery in areas of Dutch control. The gradual legal freedoms slaves gained after the Revolution served as a foot in the door towards eventual emancipation. When slaves were routinely given the ability to choose new masters, to seek work on their own, and to make money on their own (with some repayment to the slave owners), they made a crucial first step into a world of freedom. Voluntary slave manumission and self-purchase emancipations were the result of a process of negotiating the terms of slavery’s demise one person at a time. This dispersed, on-the-ground struggle was shaped by statutory law, as others have recognized, but, arguably, it was the common law that demonstrated and determined New Yorkers’ changing attitudes about slaveholding. Courtroom decisions about interpreting the states’ laws on slavery guaranteed that the freedoms won through slaves’ negotiations with their enslavers would be protected by the courts.

While the Mansfeld Regiment traveled through southern Germany in August 1625, flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze accidentally shot and killed his friend Hans Heinrich Tauerling during a drinking bout. Two days later, one of the regiment’s cavalry companies started a fire in the small town of Remmingen near Ulm. Thick descriptions of these events reveal daily life in the Mansfeld Regiment, as well as attitudes toward masculinity, murder, guilt, drunkenness, and violent death.

This chapter posits that the emerging methods, perspectives, and goals of legal design fit squarely within the history of law. It offers a quick sketch of the history of the development of the rule of law over the last 4,000 years, which sets the stage for an examination of that history as a design history – humanity’s collective work over four millennia of ideating, prototyping, testing, and refining the systems of rules we use to live collectively. It then makes a few points about the benefits of design as design – its relative speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to making things that are useful to people. It will then introduce the concept of “longtermerism,” which refers to a concept or ideology that emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking and decision-making in various aspects of life. The chapter wraps things up with a note of urgency and optimism based on the argument that no human should be denied the benefit of the rule of law.

Chapter 6 traces how, in the aftermath of these reforms, the Neogranadian church, at the parish level, became an Indigenous and grassroots organisation. One aspect of this transformation was institutional, as it came to be better staffed, organised, and equipped. Another was ideological, as the lessons of the Jesuit experiments with missionary methods were extended across the archdiocese, centring everyday practice, popular devotion, and social institutions. But the most significant aspect was led by Indigenous people themselves, as the shift away from punitive policies and towards a more inclusive Christianisation, coupled with the implementation of a more effective language policy, created space and opportunities for people in rural parishes to interact with Christianity in new ways. This went much further than the authorities had intended, as they learned when they sought to rein in some of these changes, and it transformed the New Kingdom of Granada forever.

The conclusion reflects on the profound transformations undergone by the New Kingdom of Granada by the late seventeenth century, and how this began to powerfully shape the images of the early colonial past that began to appear in works of historical writing in that period, with long-lasting consequences. This triumphal register of writing, that cast the Muisca as the third great empire of the Americas and asserted the swift success of the Spanish colonial administration, has long obscured perceptions about the Indigenous people of highland New Granada. As this book has demonstrated, a granular exploration of an exhaustive array of colonial archival sources paints a very different picture: on the one hand, of the anxieties and limitations at the heart of the colonial project, the incomplete and contingent nature of colonial power, and of deep and multi-layered crises of governance; and on the other, of the complex ways in which Indigenous people, in their interaction with Christianity, made possible the coming of the New Kingdom of Granada.