Nancy O. Gallman is a Ph.D. candidate in Early American History at the University of California, Davis.  Her dissertation, “American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Colonial East Florida,” is a comparative legal history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish–Native East Florida. It examines the interactions between Spanish colonial law and the customary law of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles to show how a broadly defined, pluralistic system of law shaped the development of East Florida, where neither the Spanish nor Native peoples could dominate but where both had to adapt to the other. She argues that, on the basis of mutual tolerance and restraint, this mixed legal culture reinforced Native sovereignty, promoted multiple conceptions of justice, race, gender, labor, and property, and, as a result, made East Florida a greater target of U.S. aggression in the early years of the new republic. This study of legal pluralism in East Florida refines our understanding of the role of Native law in the constitution of power in colonial North America.