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Full-Text Articles in Law
To Kill A Mockingbird Perspectives, Sherrilyn A. Ifill
To Kill A Mockingbird Perspectives, Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Faculty Scholarship
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most influential and widely acclaimed legal novels in American history. It tells the story of a small-town white lawyer who is appointed to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. The lawyer, Atticus Finch, is one of the great legal heroes of American fiction. The story, told from the perspective of Atticus' daughter Scout, explores race, class, gender, family and law. Most of all it is a both critical and loving account of the white South. This article is a personal story about the influence of …
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 …