“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

that has greatly expanded the spaces in which law or at least “law-like” practices and
institutions regulate social relations. Seminal works by Robert Ellickson, Carol Greenhouse,
Barbara Yngvesson and David Engel have shown that a great deal of disputes are resolved
outside of the realm of formal law, either through shared applications of agreed social
standards or in highly localized, informal settings only marginally connected to institutions
like courts and judges. 25 Once order is divorced from the reaches of formal law, these
scholars have noted that legal practices built around shared notions of justice and experience
can extend into a virtually limitless number of settings unbound by national jurisdictions.
Consistent with this observation, John Phillip Reid explored how settlers on the American
frontier turned to traditional conceptions of ownership and possession to define property
rights beyond the limits of state authority in the United States’ west. In a similar vein, Dylan
Penningroth has demonstrated how even in the absence of formal legal rights or access to
the courts, slaves in the southern United States established and sustained customary property
rights through networks of personal relationships. 26 Charles Cutter has stressed the
importance of the daily practices at the base of the Spanish colonial legal system in the
Mexican borderlands to the maintenance of imperial loyalty even in the absence of definitive
political control. 27 Lauren Benton has reframed the Uruguayan borderlands as a region
defined by “legal pluralism” in order to understand how states gradually clarified sovereign
boundaries by addressing prickly questions of foreign status and identity within the national
25 Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991), Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M.
Engel, Law and Community in Three American Towns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
26 Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in
the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
27 Charles R. Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700-1810, 1st ed.
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).
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