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Full-Text Articles in Law
Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman
Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman
Faculty Scholarship
Legal doctrines banning polygamy grew out of nineteenth century Americans’ view that Mormons betrayed the nation by engaging in conduct associated with people of color. This article reveals the racial underpinnings of polygamy law by examining cartoons and other antipolygamy rhetoric of the time to demonstrate Sir Henry Maine’s famous observation that the move in progressive societies is “from status to contract.” It frames antipolygamists’ contentions as a visceral defense of racial and sexual status in the face of encroaching contractual thinking. Polygamy, they reasoned, was “natural” for people of color but so “unnatural” for whites as to produce a …
Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks
Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks
Faculty Scholarship
Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude—slavery in the mid-seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry—English; her …
Mestizaje And The Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There Is No Blackness, Taunya Lovell Banks
Mestizaje And The Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There Is No Blackness, Taunya Lovell Banks
Faculty Scholarship
Many legal scholars who write about Mexican mestizaje omit references to Afromexicans, Mexico’s African roots, and contemporary anti-black sentiments in the Mexican and Mexican American communities. The reasons for the erasure or invisibility of Mexico’s African roots are complex. It argues that post-colonial officials and theorists in shaping Mexico’s national image were influenced two factors: the Spanish colonial legacy and the complex set of rules creating a race-like caste system with a distinct anti-black bias reinforced through art; and the negative images of Mexico and Mexicans articulated in the United States during the early nineteenth century. The post-colonial Mexican becomes …
Setting The Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, Taunya Lovell Banks
Setting The Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, Taunya Lovell Banks
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Maryland Context Of Dred Scott: The Decline In The Legal Status Of Maryland Free Blacks 1776-1810, David S. Bogen
The Maryland Context Of Dred Scott: The Decline In The Legal Status Of Maryland Free Blacks 1776-1810, David S. Bogen
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.