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The wide-ranging chapters of this ambitious volume advance our understanding of how Natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires strained to use the other’s law as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  Europeans and Natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right. Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their resort to each other’s law. Each misconstrued the other’s legal commitments while learning about them. The contributors explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: how and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically, and morally—to Natives, and vice versa? To address this question, the volume goes beyond existing scholarship, which juxtaposes settlers’ and Natives’ understanding in empire-specific circumstances, by adding another axis of comparison, that between English and Iberian New World empires. Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples. Understanding the conflict and transformation of notions of justice and law through a dual comparative study of legal intelligibility is the objective of this volume.

Visual and multimedia digital technologies are transforming the practice of law: how lawyers construct and argue their cases, present evidence to juries, and communicate with each other. They are also changing how law is disseminated throughout and used by the general public. What are these technologies, how are they used and perceived in the courtroom and in wider culture, and how do they affect legal decision making? This book explains how, when, and why legal practice moved from a largely words-only environment to one more dependent on and driven by images, and how rapidly developing technologies have further accelerated this change. It discusses older visual technologies, such as videotape evidence, and then current and future uses of visual displays and digital multimedia technologies, including trial presentation software and interactive multimedia. It also describes how law itself is going online, in the form of virtual courts, cyberjuries, and more, and explores the implications of law's movement to computer screens.