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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Teaching Slavery In American Constitutional Law, Paul Finkelman
Teaching Slavery In American Constitutional Law, Paul Finkelman
Akron Law Review
From 1787 until the Civil War, slavery was probably the single most important economic institution in the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, slave property was worth at least two billion dollars. In the aggregate, the value of all the slaves in the United States exceeded the total value of all the nations railroads or all its factories. Slavery led to two major political compromises of the antebellum period, as well as to the most politically divisive Supreme Court decision in our history. Vast amounts of political and legal energy went into dealing with the institution. It …
Teaching Free Speech From An Incomplete Fossil Record, Michael Kent Curtis
Teaching Free Speech From An Incomplete Fossil Record, Michael Kent Curtis
Akron Law Review
The second part of this symposium has been devoted to how we teach the Constitution. It has emphasized what gets left out. The reader will see a pattern. Paul Finkelman is a leading scholar on the law of slavery and the Constitution. Paul thinks – and I believe he is correct – that the immense influence of slavery on American constitutional law is too often neglected in our constitutional law courses. James Wilson has studied how political philosophers – Aristotle, Rousseau, James Harrington, and others – have understood the distribution of wealth as a central factor affecting how the constitution …
The Fourteenth Amendment: The Great Equalizer Of The American People, Abel A. Bartley
The Fourteenth Amendment: The Great Equalizer Of The American People, Abel A. Bartley
Akron Law Review
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was ratified on July 28, 1868, demonstrated the change in attitude, which hit many Americans after the chaotic Civil War. It was America’s first attempt to legally challenge White supremacist ideas by creating a truly equal multiracial society. With its emphasis on equal protection and equal justice, the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to be the great equalizer of American people, legally changing African American men into White men so that they could enjoy all the rights, privileges, and immunities of United States citizenship. However, determining the meaning of equality uncovered the …