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The Federal Right To Recover Fugitive Slaves: An Absolute But Self-Defeating Property Right, Jeffrey M. Schmitt

School of Law Faculty Publications

A key insight of modern property scholarship is that property rights are limited by the rights of others. In the antebellum era, slave owners’ property rights in fugitive slaves who escaped into the North existed in tension with the rights of free blacks who might be wrongfully claimed. At first, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, as supplemented by the law in most Northern states, limited a slave owner’s property rights by providing limited legal protections to free blacks against being erroneously claimed as slaves. As attitudes towards slavery changed, however, state laws in the North became increasingly protective of …