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 …

Reparations And Equal Opportunity, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a sympathetic interpretation of reparations claims made on behalf of African Americans and suggests how they could properly be honored. It reviews the federal government’s role in supporting racial subordination and its continuing failure to address the inequitable consequences, which public policy now largely ignores. It sketches a national rectification project, comprising a comprehensive set of public programs that would attack the persisting legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The programs can be justified by the government’s duty to insure equal opportunity for our society’s children and, most urgently, by corrective justice, because the inequities are attributable …