Table of Contents:
  • Introduction, Many legalities of colonization : a manifesto of destiny for early American legal history / Christopher Tomlins
  • Discovery, grant, charter, conquest, or purchase : John Adams on the legal basis for English possession of North America / James Muldoon
  • Salamanders and Sons of God : the culture appeal in early New England / Mary Sarah Bilder
  • "Rigid and inclement" : origins of the Jamaica slave laws of the seventeenth century / David Barry Gaspar
  • Legal fictions and the rule(s) of law : the Jeffersonian critique of common-law adjudication / David Thomas Konig
  • "Justice will be done us" : Algonquian demands for reciprocity in the courts of European settlers / Katherine Hermes
  • "Lest we go in search of relief to our lands and our nation" : customary justice and colonial law in the New Mexico borderlands, 1680-1821 / James F. Brooks
  • Customary laws of marriage : legal pluralism, colonialism, and Narragansett Indian identity in eighteenth-century Rhode Island / Ann Marie Plane
  • "Liberty to complaine" : servant petitions in Maryland, 1652-1797 / Christine Daniels.
  • "As though I my self was pr[e]sent" : Virginia women with power of attorney / Linda L. Sturtz
  • Women and the political culture of eighteenth-century Virginia : gender, property law, and voting rights / John G. Kolp and Terri L. Snyder
  • Age of reason? : children, testimony, and consent in early America / Holly Brewer
  • Was there a Calvinist type of patriarchy? : New Haven Colony reconsidered in the early modern context / Cornelia Hughes Dayton.
  • Limits of authority : courts, ethnicity, and gender in the Middle Colonies, 1670-1710 / William M. Offutt, Jr.
  • Farmers in court : Orange County, North Carolina, 1750-1776 / Richard Lyman Bushman
  • Long road to Vidal : charity law and state formation in early America / A.G. Roeber
  • Afterword, Death and transfiguration of early American legal law / Bruce H. Mann.