Students of criminal justice, crime, and punishment have long insisted that to understand the role and operation of law in any society, it is necessary to go beyond the examination of statutes. 1 The texts of statutory laws reflect pressures on lawmakers and may reveal an elite's sense of the ideological, social and political needs of the moment. They do not, however, reveal the working of the law in daily life. Laws may be ignored: they may be applied in ways that differ markedly from their wording and from the intentions of those who drafted them. Especially in the case of criminal law, we need to look at the workings of courts and other judicial and penal institutions to understand how the law was actually applied, interpreted, and understood. In this article, I use a newly discovered record of slave trials in eighteenth-century Jamaica to investigate the quotidian practices of the slave courts. Jamaican slave courts and the punishments they inflicted, I suggest, enacted rituals that both dramatized and sustained the power relations of this colonial slave society. Rather than representing the supposed common discipline of all to a single rule of law, as did the contemporary English spectacle of trial and punishment, Jamaican judicial practice emphasized the difference between enslaved and free, and valorized the slaveholder's private penal power.The injunction to examine the working of courts in context is relatively easily obeyed in societies where judicial decisions were diligently recorded. English historians, for instance, have used the reams of paper generated by the courts that dealt with serious crimes. As a result we have detailed accounts both of the relative frequencies of different kinds of criminal prosecutions and the outcomes of those prosecuted, and of the nature of interactions in and outside the courrroom.i Even in England, where many court decisions were recorded, the great majority of legal interactions are beyond the reach of the quantitative historian, since they were made by magistrates who did not note down their decisions.' In addition, legal records produced within the common law tradition rarely give more than summary information about the content of cases; they lack the detailed records of evidence produced by continental European legal systems.

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Obeah has been a crime in much of the English-speaking Caribbean for more than two centuries, and remains so in many parts of the region. Despite the publication of many literary works that rewrite obeah as resistance or indigenous knowledge, and the work of respected historians, anthropologists, theologians, and critics demonstrating that obeah is and was often used for protection rather than to cause harm, many Caribbean states retain anti-obeah laws, and many ordinary people in the region understand obeah as a dangerous and hostile phenomenon. 1The continuing popular and official hostility to obeah suggests that arguments that work through demonstrating the inaccuracy of negative views of obeah can only go so far. Such arguments face the difficulty of trying to redefine the essential nature of a term that has historically been part of a complex and multifaceted system of signification rather than a singular thing. 2 This article argues that colonial law-making and law-enforcing practices have made