Books:

A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900. Cambridge University Press (2010).

Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900. Cambridge University Press (2002). Winner of the 2003 World History Association Book Award; and the 2003 James Willard Hurst Prize.

Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and Industrial Development in Spain. Albany: State University of New York Press (1990).

The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, eds., Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton. Johns Hopkins University Press (1989).

Articles:

Lauren Benton and Benjamin Straumann, “Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice,” Law and History Review 28 (1): 1-38, 2010.

“Legal Problems of Empire in Gentili’s Hispanica Advocatio,” in Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations (Oxford University Press), 269-282, 2010.

“The British Atlantic in Global Context,” David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009, second edition)

“From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi-Sovereignty, 1870-1900,” Law and History Review 26.3 (2009): 595-620.

“Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, October Vol. 47, 4 (2005): 700-724.

"'The Laws of this Country’: Foreigners and the Legal Construction of Sovereignty in Uruguay, 1830-1875," Law and History Review. 19, 3 (2001): 479-512.

"Making Order Out of Trouble: Jurisdictional Politics in the Spanish Colonial Borderlands," Law and Social Inquiry. 26, 2 (2001): 373-401.

"Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State." Comparative Studies in Society and History. 41, 3 (2000): 563-588.

"The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World: Jurisdictional Politics as Institutional Order." Journal of World History Vol. 11, 1 (2000): 27-56.