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Articles 1 - 18 of 18
Full-Text Articles in Law
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.
Distant Voices Then And Now: The Impact Of Isolation On The Courtroom Narratives Of Slave Ship Captives And Asylum Seekers, Tara Patel
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Part I compares the nineteenth century cases of the Antelope and the Amistad to identify why they resulted in different outcomes despite having similar fact patterns. The Antelope concerned the fate of approximately 280 African captives discovered on a slave trade ship upon its interception by a U.S. revenue cutter. Since the slave trade in the United States was illegal at the time, the captives were transported to Savannah for trial through which their status—free or slave—would be determined. After a lengthy trial and appeals process in which Spain and Portugal laid claim to the captives, the Supreme Court determined …
How Does The Law Put A Historical Analogy To Work?: Defining The Imposition Of "A Condition Analogous To That Of A Slave" In Modern Brazil, Rebecca J. Scott, Leonardo Augusto De Andrade Barbosa, Carlos Henrique Borlido Haddad
How Does The Law Put A Historical Analogy To Work?: Defining The Imposition Of "A Condition Analogous To That Of A Slave" In Modern Brazil, Rebecca J. Scott, Leonardo Augusto De Andrade Barbosa, Carlos Henrique Borlido Haddad
Articles
Over the last decades, the Brazilian state has engaged in concerted legal efforts to identify and prosecute cases of what officials refer to as “slave labor” (trabalho escravo). At a conceptual level, the campaign has paired the constitutional protection of human dignity and the “social value of labor” with an expansive interpretation of the offense described in Article 149 of the Criminal Code as “the reduction of a person to a condition analogous to that of a slave.” At the operational level, mobile teams of inspectors and prosecutors have intervened in thousands of work sites, and labor prosecutors …
International Law And Contemporary Slavery: The Long View, Rebecca J. Scott
International Law And Contemporary Slavery: The Long View, Rebecca J. Scott
Michigan Journal of International Law
The three essays in this special issue come together to confirm the value of exploring varying domestic expressions of and adaptations to international legal ideals. In each polity, lawmakers have viewed the terms “slavery” and “slave labor” in part through a domestic historical lens, and have drafted (or failed to draft) legislation accordingly. The United States inherited core concepts dating back to the moment of abolition of chattel slavery, and thus initially built its prohibitions of modern slavery on nineteenth-century rights guarantees and anti-peonage statutes, later reinforced by modern concepts of human trafficking. Having just emerged from a long dictatorship, …
Prison Segregation: Symposium Introduction And Preliminary Data On Racial Disparities, Margo Schlanger
Prison Segregation: Symposium Introduction And Preliminary Data On Racial Disparities, Margo Schlanger
Articles
For this Introduction, I undertake to look a bit more broadly at recent data. The best sources of demographic information about prisoners are the various surveys and censuses conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). While no BJS publication directly addresses the issue, and no BJS dataset allows its full analysis, it is possible to glean something from the most recent BJS prison census, the 2005 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities.
Under Color Of Law: Siliadin V. France And The Dynamics Of Enslavement In Historical Perspective, Rebecca J. Scott
Under Color Of Law: Siliadin V. France And The Dynamics Of Enslavement In Historical Perspective, Rebecca J. Scott
Book Chapters
When is it appropriate to apply the term ‘slavery’—a concept that appears to rest on a property right—to patterns of exploitation in contemporary society, when no state extends formal recognition to the possibility of the ownership of property in a human being? Historians, who generally position themselves as enemies of anachronism, may be particularly resistant to the use of an ancient term to describe a twenty-first century reality. And jurists have often been understandably reluctant to employ a word whose historical meaning was so closely tied to a specific property relationship that has long since been abolished in Europe and …
Paper Thin: Freedom And Re-Enslavement In The Diaspora Of The Haitian Revolution, Rebecca J. Scott
Paper Thin: Freedom And Re-Enslavement In The Diaspora Of The Haitian Revolution, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carre and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified …
Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott
Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.
Rawls And Reparations, Martin D. Carcieri
Rawls And Reparations, Martin D. Carcieri
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
In the past two years, four related events have sharpened debates on race in the U.S.: President Obama's election, the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, that Court's ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, and the arrest of Obama's friend, Harvard professor Henry Gates. The President has spoken of a "teaching moment" arising from these events. Moreover, his writings, speeches and lawmaking efforts illustrate the contractual nature of Obama's thinking. The President (and all concerned citizens) should thus find useful an analysis of racial policy and justice in light of the work of John Rauls. Rawls may …
She...Refuses To Deliver Up Herself As The Slave Of Your Petitioner': Émigrés, Enslavement, And The 1808 Louisiana Digest Of The Civil Laws (Symposium On The Bicentennial Of The Digest Of 1808--Collected Papers), Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
Philosophically and juridically, the construct of a slave-a "person with a price"--contains multiple ambiguities. Placing the category of slave among the distinctions of persons "established by law," the 1808 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Termtoiy of Orleans recognized that "slave" is not a natural category, inhering in human beings. It is an agreement among other human beings to treat one of their fellows as property. But the Digest did not specify how such a property right came into existence in a given instance. The definition of a slave was simply ostensive, pointing toward rather than …
Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott
Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
From French and Creole to Spanish, the domain of the Napoleonic Empire to the king of Spain, crossing the strait separating the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the Spanish colony of Cuba entailed a change of language and government. Some 18,000 people made that transition between the spring and summer of 1803 during the Revolutionary War in Saint-Dominque. Six years later, many crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to New Orleans and the recently acquired Louisiana Territory under the authority of a territorial governor and the United States Congress. What would these crossings lead to for those who had …
It Could Happen To "You": Pay-To-Stay Jail Upgrades, Kim Shayo Buchanan
It Could Happen To "You": Pay-To-Stay Jail Upgrades, Kim Shayo Buchanan
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
In the jails of Los Angeles County, about 21,000 detainees are held in filthy cells so overcrowded—four men in a cell built for two, six to a four-man cell—that, as federal judge Dean D. Pregerson observed in 2006, inmates must stay in their bunks at all times because there is not enough room for them to stand. These men—ninety percent of whom are pretrial detainees— are held in these conditions twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, and are typically allowed only a single three-hour exercise period weekly. Other inmates are held for days in a county “reception center” …
A Cuban Connection: Edwin F. Atkins, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., And The Former Slaves Of Soledad Plantation, Rebecca J. Scott
A Cuban Connection: Edwin F. Atkins, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., And The Former Slaves Of Soledad Plantation, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
Edwin F. Atkins and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., stand out on this stage not as major players but as a particularly intriguing Boston connection. Among the truly major players, planters like Juli?n Zulueta and the Count of Casa More owned hundreds of slaves and shaped Spanish policy. On the Cuban nationalist side, few could equal the impact of Antonio Maceo, the mulato insurgent general who insisted on full emancipation at the end of the 1868-1878 war, or the thousands of rebels who fought under the orders of rebel generals Maceo and Maximo Gomez. As the master of some ninety-five patrocinados …
The Provincial Archive As A Place Of Memory: The Role Of Former Slaves In The Cuban War Of Independence (1895-98), Rebecca Scott
The Provincial Archive As A Place Of Memory: The Role Of Former Slaves In The Cuban War Of Independence (1895-98), Rebecca Scott
Book Chapters
Prof. Scott focuses on the study of the role of former slaves in the Cuban War of Independence, in light of the avoidance of the theme of race within this war in Cuban historiography. She discusses reasons for the silence on race issues, and for the historic construction of the "myth" of racial equality in this era.
Beyond State Sovereignty: The Protection Of Cultural Heritage As A Shared Interest Of Humanity, Francesco Francioni
Beyond State Sovereignty: The Protection Of Cultural Heritage As A Shared Interest Of Humanity, Francesco Francioni
Michigan Journal of International Law
In this paper the author will try to explore the topic from a different perspective: i.e. the emergence of cultural heritage as part of the shared interest of humanity, with the consequent need for international law to safeguard it in its material and living manifestations, including the cultural communities that create, perform and maintain it. Culture in itself is not extraneous to the formation of the modern nation State. Especially in the history of nineteenth century Europe, culture as language, religion, literary and artistic traditions provided the cement and the legitimizing element to support the claim to independent statehood.
Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott
Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.
A Proposal To The Hanodaganyas To Decolonize Federal Indian Control Law, Robert B. Porter
A Proposal To The Hanodaganyas To Decolonize Federal Indian Control Law, Robert B. Porter
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In this Article, cast in the form of a letter to President William Jefferson Clinton, Professor Porter argues for the decolonization of federal Indian control law. After detailing the religious and colonialist roots of early Supreme Court decisions dealing with the Indian nations and giving an overview of the evolution of federal Indian policy, Professor Porter argues for the decolonization of federal Indian control law on several grounds: 1. the world community has rejected colonialism policies; 2. federal Indian control law denies basic human rights of self-determination; 3. colonization has partially succeeded in destroying the Indian nations; and 4. decolonization …
Safeguarding Due Process In A Hostile Environment: Foreign Lawyers In South Africa, David S. Abramowitz
Safeguarding Due Process In A Hostile Environment: Foreign Lawyers In South Africa, David S. Abramowitz
Michigan Journal of International Law
Part I of this note briefly describes the effect of apartheid on human rights in South Africa. It then examines how liberal South African attorneys use procedural due process, as defined by the rule of law, to counter these effects. Part II discusses the methods used by foreign attorneys to support South African human rights lawyers. In particular, this section focuses on the activities of the International Commission of Jurists and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The note concludes that infusing fair process into the South African legal order is the most significant contribution foreign lawyers can …