Legal historians have long demonstrated that law–its use, its undermining, its absence, its innovation–is an important tool for understanding the internal workings of Spanish colonial societies. The massive paperwork generated by Indigenous and Black litigation across the empire provides an extraordinary lens for seeing the invention and erosion of social and cultural norms. The four papers on this panel take distinct approaches on four separate places that span the colonial period: the city of Panamá in the late 16th century; a rural village in the 17th century Central Andes; eighteenth-century Oaxaca, Mexico; and late 18th and early 19th century Louisiana. These cases demonstrate not only physical and legal conflict over land, fiscal categories, and resources, but they also provide new ways to think about gender, family, and community. De la Puente Luna asks whether Indigenous women could wield new legal instruments such as titles to protect their access to land over generations, even while community officials exercised control over resource inheritance. In Yannakakis' Mexican communities, partnership contracts might have been similarly embraced as a way to avoid conflict and litigation in the face of external interventions. Graubart looks at a community of free Black and Mulato men and women in cities on the Panamanian isthmus who sought to exempt themselves from an expensive tax by imagining themselves as a collective of loyal vassals who had already served the monarch in extraordinary ways. And Cors reads litigation in a borderland where numerous nations came into conflicts that reflect distinct understandings not only of property but rights and law. Comment will be provided by the legal historian Manuel Bastias Saavedra.