My research has dealt with several themes:

(1) The Development of Early American Law in a Comparative Context: I am currently working on: The Beginnings of American Law: A Comparative History (under contract, Yale University Press) (with Steven Wilf). The book explores the origins of American law (c.1600-1820) with one eye on the Spanish and French New World empires and the other eye on Ireland and British India. The comparative approach can particularly illuminate how America came to see itself as a law-centered society. I am also co-editing with Lauren Benton a volume of essays, entitled, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (forthcoming, NYU Press, 2012). This project illuminates the historical meaning and provenance of the concept of legal pluralism. And it explores how the legal pluralism so marked in overseas European empires influenced claims about sovereignty, the role of conquered subjects and religious minorities within empires, and the development of inter-imperial relations.

(2) The Political and Intellectual History of Legal Communications: Representative articles include: “Legal Communications and Imperial Governance: British North America and Spanish America Compared,” in Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume 1: Early America (1580-1815), ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Michael Grossberg (Cambridge, 2008), 104-143; and “The Memorial Culture of Early Modern English Lawyers: Memory as Keyword, Shelter, and Identity, 1560-1640,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (1998), which received the honorable mention for the 1999 Sutherland Prize from the American Society for Legal History.

(3) The Intertwined Influence of Law and Religion on Governance: Representative articles include: “Puritan Godly Discipline in Comparative Perspective: Legal Pluralism and the Sources of ‘Intensity,’” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 975-1002; and “Distinguishing Eternal from Transient Law: The Judicial Laws of Moses and Natural Law,” Past and Present (in press, 2012)

I am the founder and director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which meets under the auspices of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library (Chicago). The Symposium yearly presents a conference that gathers law professors, historians, and social scientists to explore a particular topic in comparative legal history in the early modern period, broadly defined (c.1492-1815).