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Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John D. Bessler Jan 2009

Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John D. Bessler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian, penned . The treatise argued that state-sanctioned executions and torture violate natural law. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, author John D. Bessler provides a comprehensive review of the abolition movement, from before Beccaria's time to the present. Bessler reviews Beccaria's influence on Enlightenment thinkers and more importantly, on America's Founding Fathers. The Article also provides an extensive review of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and then contrasts it with the trend in International Law towards the abolition of the death penalty. It then discusses the current state of the death penalty …


Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Education And Abolition, Kabria Baumgartner Jan 2009

Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Education And Abolition, Kabria Baumgartner

Ethnic Studies Review

Some thirty years before Harriet Ann Jacobs opened the Jacobs Free School in Alexandria, Virginia in January 1864, one of her first students was her fifty-threeyear-old uncle, Fred. The seventeen-year-old Harriet appreciated her uncle's "most earnest desire to learn to read" and promised to teach him.1 As slaves, both teacher and student risked the punishment of "thirtynine lashes on [the] bare back" as well as imprisonment for violating North Carolina's anti-literacy laws targeting African Americans.2 Nevertheless they agreed to meet three times a week in a "quiet nook" where she instructed him in secret.3 While the primary goal for him …