ABSTRACT
Legal processes that dispossessed Irish Catholics of landholdings were a key component of Protestant settlement and subsequent English and Anglo-Irish land ownership in Ireland under the British colonial regime. The popular practice of boycotting was accompanied regularly by other forms of intimidation directed at violators of the unwritten law that included anonymous threatening letters, injury to livestock, burning of crops, disruption of foxing-hunting, firing gunshots into homes, and occasional executions. Yet the “unwritten law” disrupts the democratic configuration and paradoxically subverts the assumed relationship between legibility and legality, rendering the illegal legible in powerful ways that were linked to violence. In this context of settler colonialism, which legalized land dispossession and provoked organized resistance to it, the practice of a shadow justice system existing simultaneously and parallel to the official, institutionalized one developed in Ireland in the decades before the war for independence.
