The study of changing legal conceptions over time, as they manifest themselves in the day-to-day practice of the courts, has proven to be one of the most rewarding, albeit arduous, areas of inquiry in law history. Court records provide unique insights into an otherwise invisible flow of legal understandings in the past and into common people's sharing or contesting those views. This article, based on the court records of domestic violence and rape in the Arecibo Superior Court from 1860–1895, permits revealing insights into the ways in which these offenses were shaped, as legal concepts, and into magistrates' and common people's constructions of gender. It studies criminal law administration in the Arecibo region and its connections to women. The Arecibo judicial district included nine municipalities on the northern coast and interior of Puerto Rico. Its records comprise a collection of thousands of handwritten documents left in extremely fragile state by humidity and poor conservation. They constitute a very large sample of the judicial work in the region.