About Lauren Benton

Professor of history and law and dean of humanities at New York University. Her research focuses on the comparative legal history of empires. Her recent books are Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002), which was awarded the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize and the World History Association Book Prize, and A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010).