This panel explores nuanced views of legal regimes and royal authority in the seventeenth century Spanish empire. The papers presented here build upon recent literature on the Spanish empire as a polycentric monarchy and the complex colonial factors that influenced the development of imperial legal regimes to demonstrate both the limit of royal authority and the way local agents interpreted it to fit their own agendas. Haley Schroer demonstrates how colonial authorities in New Spain served as the primary arbiters of royal sumptuary laws, manipulating and expanding established regulations to increase their perceived control over subjects in Mexico. Schroer argues that while the crown only intermittently issued sumptuary laws, authorities at the viceregal level considered them to be dynamic tools to maintain oversight over the increasingly diverse population of New Spain in the seventeenth century. Viceregal decrees and individual legal dispensations allowed officials to reinforce sumptuary restrictions and to extend viceregal power. On the other end of the spectrum, royal institutions like the Council of the Indies attempted to expand their own authority at the expense of local autonomy by misappropriating imperial policies that initially were instituted to combat contraband. Keith Richards examines this process in eastern Cuba, where early in the seventeenth century local authorities and private actors enjoyed a certain level of autonomy by default due to their relative isolation from imperial centers like Havana and Santo Domingo. Royal investigations aimed at combating contraband trade in coastal cities like Santiago and Bayamo became less effective at combating informal trade networks but nevertheless continued over the course of the century. Richards argues that a close look at these investigations reveals that they became less focused on contraband and more on maintaining imperial control over the subjects of a far-flung province. Under the later Habsburgs, the ad hoc manner in which royal or colonial officials applied Spanish law to secure diverse interests extended as far as the king himself. Oren Okhovat considers the reaction of Spanish monarchs to the growing participation of leading Spanish merchants in transnational merchant associations and engagement in contraband trade in Spanish America. Spanish monarchs readily issued royal pardons to its leading merchants, which rarely involved corporeal punishment but always included the payment of a fee relative to the venture’s monetary value. Okhovat argues that the regularity in which pardons were used in this way demonstrates the crown’s strategy for reaping benefits from private transnational trade ventures without changing the laws that forbade them. Together the papers demonstrate that the Spanish empire’s legal regime was fluid and readily adjusted to meet specific needs, whether that involved colonial officials expanding royal decrees beyond their original scope to implement their own agendas, the crown repurposing one set of laws to accomplish broader imperial goals, or the monarchy circumventing their own laws to serve economic interests.