Professor Richard Ross has published Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America with NYU Press. The book is co-edited by Brian P. Owensby of the University of Virginia.
The book abstract is as follows:
As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another among settlers and indigenous seeking to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and Natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of each other's legal ideas. The volume examines how Natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires used the other’s ideas of law and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource. Settlers and indigenous people construed and misconstrued each other’s legal commitments while learning about them, never quite sure if they were on solid ground. Chapters explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice become intelligible—tactically, technically, and morally—to Natives, and vice versa? Ultimately, Justice in a New World offers a dual comparative study of how people in a colonial encounter struggled to make laws and codes of justice intelligible.
For additional information and to purchase, visit nyupress.org.