“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