Law Commons^™

Affirmative Action For The Master Class: The Creation Of The Proslavery Constitution, Paul Finkelman

Akron Law Review

The Constitution of 1787 was a proslavery document, designed to prevent any national assault on slavery, while at the same time structured to protect the interests of slaveowners at the expense of African Americans and their antislavery white allies. To understand this earliest form of affirmative action, I begin with a view of the Constitution first articulated by the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and then turn to an examination of the Convention that wrote the Constitution and the document that convention produced.

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

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 …

How To Establish Flying The Confederate Flag With The State As Sponsor Violates The Equal Protection Clause, L. Darnell Weeden

Akron Law Review

The issue to be addressed is whether it is constitutionally permissible under the Equal Protection Clause for a state to fly a Confederate flag over its state capitol dome or other public property.

Like many of the South’s ghosts of the past slavery, racial discrimination, and race relations in general, the battle over the Confederate flag continues to impact national politics and rages on about the state of South Carolina. South Carolina is again the catalyst for a conflict about Southern Confederate values. South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union and the only state where the Confederate …

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 …

John A. Bingham And The Story Of American Liberty: The Lost Cause Meets The "Lost Clause", Michael Kent Curtis

Akron Law Review

Nations have stories too. Ours is a story about the American Revolution against monarchy and aristocracy, a revolution based on the faith that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The revolution espoused the ideal that legitimate governmental power comes only from the consent of the governed.

In the old world, kings were sovereign. In America, the sovereign was “the people.” That ideal appeared in the preamble of the Constitution—a preamble that declared (somewhat inaccurately) that the Constitution came from “we the people” and was designed to assure liberty and justice. Though we …

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks

Akron Law Review

After a brief discussion of English subjecthood in seventeen century England and the American colonies I explore the legal theories advanced in Elizabeth Key’s freedom suit to determine whether the factors considered by the judging parties continue to have validity in contemporary America. I conclude that treating Elizabeth’s claim only as a challenge to slavery is problematic because seventeenth century English judges, unfamiliar with modern slavery, were uncertain about the applicable common law principles to apply. Villeinage – English serfdom – was an imperfect analogy to African slavery; and even if villeinage principles were applied to Elizabeth’s case the outcome …

States' Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, And The Crisis Of The Union, Paul Finkelman

Akron Law Review

The southern states did not leave the Union because the national government was trampling on their “rights.” The states that left the union never asserted that they were being denied their “states’ rights” —that the national government had obliterated the lines been between national power and state power. Nor did the southern states complain that the national government was too powerful and so it threatened the sovereignty of the state governments. On the contrary, as I set out below, the southern states mostly complained that the northern states were asserting their states’ rights and that the national government was not …