Books:

Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1900, Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, eds.  New York University Press (forthcoming).

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).

Selected Articles and Chapters:

“This Melancholy Labyrinth: The Trial of Arthur Hodge and the Boundaries of Imperial Law,” Alabama Law Review (2012): 100-1222.

“Historical Perspectives on Legal Pluralism,” in Caroline Sage, Michael Woolcock, and Brian Tamanaha, eds., Legal Pluralism and Development: Scholars and Practitioners in Dialogue (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 34-49.

 “Abolition and Imperial Law, 1780-1820,” Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, Vol. 39:3, (2011): 355-374.

“Possessing Empire: Iberian Claims and Interpolity Law,” in Saliha Bellmessous, ed., Indigenous versus European Land Claims, 1500-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2011), 19-40.

“Atlantic Law,” in Philip Morgan and Nicholas Canny, eds., Oxford Handbook on the Atlantic World, c 1450-1820 (Oxford University Press, 2011), 400-416.

 “Toward a New Legal History of Piracy: Maritime Legalities and the Myth of Universal Jurisdiction,” International Journal of Maritime History XXIII, No. 1 (2011): 1-15.

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

“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, 2010), 269-282.

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

“From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi-Sovereignty, 1870-1900,” Law and History Review 26:3 (2008): 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.