BOOK REVIEW: Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World : Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York: NYU Press, 2018), by Christopher TOMLINS.

(Source : NYU)

THE REVIEW : Christopher TOMLINS (Professor, Berkeley Law Faculty, University of California) is the author of the book review, published in The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 642–643, online access : https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz858

ABOUT THE BOOK :

Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross’s interesting collection Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America seeks to advance the history of European Atlantic empires by subjecting the legalities of colonizing to comparative assessment, specifically how encounters between Indigenous peoples and Iberian and Anglophone intruders were refracted by their idiosyncratic legal cultures. Comparison, say the editors, promises broadened conceptual purchase for historians of encounter wishing to interrogate the extent and limits of cross-cultural comprehension. Comparison will open up “new vistas on issues of jurisdiction, sovereignty, legal inclusion and exclusion, the quality and role of intermediation in structuring legal encounters and producing legal outcomes, and the intellectual foundation of justice as a guiding idea for legal engagement”.

Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 330. Cloth $89.00, paper $30.00. 

More information here.