Law Commons^™

Corrective Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Legacy Of Slavery And Jim Crow, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Chattel slavery was a brutally cruel, repressive, and exploitative system of racial subjugation. When it was abolished, the former slaveholders owed the freedmen compensation for the terrible wrongs of enslavement. Ex-slaves sought reparations, especially in the form of land, but few received any sort of recompense. The wrongs they suffered were never repaired.

No one alive today can be held accountable for the wrongs of chattel slavery, and those who might now be called upon to pay reparations were not even born until many decades after slavery ended. For some scholars, the lack of accountable parties makes current reparations claims …

The Politics Of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department Of Justice, And Civil Rights, 1866-1876, Robert John Kaczorowski

History

This landmark work of Constitutional and legal history is the leading account of the ways in which federal judges, attorneys, and other law officers defined a new era of civil and political rights in the South and implemented the revolutionary 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments during Reconstruction.