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Full-Text Articles in Law
Ownership Without Citizenship: The Creation Of Noncitizen Property Rights, Allison Brownell Tirres
Ownership Without Citizenship: The Creation Of Noncitizen Property Rights, Allison Brownell Tirres
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
At the nation’s founding, the common law of property defined ownership as an incident of citizenship. Noncitizens were unable lawfully to hold, devise, or inherit property. This doctrine eroded during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but few scholars have examined its demise or the concommittant rise of property rights for foreigners. This Article is the first sustained treatment of the creation of property rights for noncitizens in American law. It uncovers two key sources for the rights that emerged during the nineteenth century: federal territorial law, which allowed for alien property ownership and alien suffrage, and state …
Race And Constitutional Law Casebooks: Recognizing The Proslavery Constitution, Juan F. Perea
Race And Constitutional Law Casebooks: Recognizing The Proslavery Constitution, Juan F. Perea
Michigan Law Review
Federalist No. 54 shows that part of Madison's public defense of the Constitution included the defense of some of its proslavery provisions. Madison and his reading public were well aware that aspects of the Constitution protected slavery. These aspects of the Constitution were publicly debated in the press and in state ratification conventions. Just as the Constitution's protections for slavery were debated at the time of its framing and ratification, the relationship between slavery and the Constitution remains a subject of debate. Historians continue to debate the centrality of slavery to the Constitution. The majority position among historians today appears …
Public Rights And Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott
Public Rights And Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
Tracing the history of a family across three generations, from enslavement in eighteenth-century West Africa through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution and subsequent resettlement in New Orleans, then France, then Belgium, can shed light on phenomena that are Atlantic in scope. A business letter written in 1899 by the cigar merchant Edouard Tinchant to General Máximo Gómez in Cuba frames an inquiry that opens out onto a family itinerary that spanned the long nineteenth century. Rosalie Vincent’s achievement of freedom in the shadow of slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793–1803 can be seen as linked to her grandson Edouard Tinchant’s participation …
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 …
Le 'Droit D'Avoir Des Droits': Les Revendications Des Ex-Esclaves À Cuba (1872-1909), Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske
Le 'Droit D'Avoir Des Droits': Les Revendications Des Ex-Esclaves À Cuba (1872-1909), Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske
Articles
In Cuba, a distinctive process of gradual emancipation brought a large number of enslaved and recently-freed men and women into the legal culture. What earlier might have remained oral or physical challenges now took legal form, as slaves and former slaves built alliances with those who could assist them in their appeals. The assertions of former slaves suggest an emerging conviction of a "right to have rights", going well beyond the immediate refusal of their own bondage. In this light, the office of the notary and the courts of first instance became places where freedom itself was constituted through the …
Land And Liberation: Lessons For The Creation Of Effective Land Reform Policy In South Africa, Hasani Claxton
Land And Liberation: Lessons For The Creation Of Effective Land Reform Policy In South Africa, Hasani Claxton
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Based upon the premise that land reform is essential to creating socio-economic equality, easing racial tensions and stemming the tide of violence in South Africa, this note will provide suggestions for effective land reform policy. To accomplish this, this Note will examine the paths taken by several other transitional African governments in land reform policy. It will attempt to extract practical lessons from their experiences and apply them towards the development of effective land redistribution policy in South Africa. Part I of this note will provide a historical overview of colonialism and land law in Africa. Part II will examine …
Property In Writing, Property On The Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, And Citizenship In The Aftermath Of Slavery, Cuba, 1880-1909, Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske
Property In Writing, Property On The Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, And Citizenship In The Aftermath Of Slavery, Cuba, 1880-1909, Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske
Articles
In the most literal sense, the abolition of slavery marks the moment when one human being cannot be held as property by another human being, for it ends the juridical conceit of a "person with a price." At the same time, the aftermath of emancipation forcibly reminds us that property as a concept rests on relations among human beings, not just between people and things. The end of slavery finds former masters losing possession of persons, and former slaves acquiring it. But it also finds other resources being claimed and contested, including land, tools, and animals-resources that have shaped former …
Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath
Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath
Michigan Law Review
There is a familiar egalitarian constitutional tradition and another we have largely forgotten. The familiar one springs from Brown v. Board of Education; its roots lie in the Reconstruction era. Court-centered and countermajoritarian, it takes aim at caste and racial subordination. The forgotten one also originated with Reconstruction, but it was a majoritarian tradition, addressing its arguments to lawmakers and citizens, not to courts. Aimed against harsh class inequalities, it centered on decent work and livelihoods, social provision, and a measure of economic independence and democracy. Borrowing a phrase from its Progressive Era proponents, I will call it the social …