Spirits Before the Law

“A fresh and extremely ambitious book, Spirits Before the Law represents a vision of early American studies that will help all of us meet the political moment.” - Greta LaFleur, author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

“Spirits Before the Law helps us to understand how and why individuals have used faith to short-circuit, repurpose, and circumvent the U.S. legal system over hundreds of years of settler colonization. Hannah Manshel’s transhistorical, multidisciplinary approach is both timely and needed at a moment when the stakes of the law’s spirit feel as critical as ever.” - Kathryn Walkiewicz, author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State