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Book Review: Henry J. Richardson Iii, The Origins Of African-American Interests In International Law, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

This short review evaluates Professor Richardson's book both as a contribution to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and as contribution to critical race theory.

Professor Richardson has read innumerable historical monographs, works of legal and sociological theory, international law and critical race theory. Armed with this store of knowledge, he is able to recount a detailed narrative of African-American claims to, interests in and appeals to international law over approximately two centuries spanning, with occasional peeks both forward and backward in time, from the landing of the first African slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the 1815 Treaty …

She...Refuses To Deliver Up Herself As The Slave Of Your Petitioner': Émigrés, Enslavement, And The 1808 Louisiana Digest Of The Civil Laws (Symposium On The Bicentennial Of The Digest Of 1808--Collected Papers), Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Philosophically and juridically, the construct of a slave-a "person with a price"--contains multiple ambiguities. Placing the category of slave among the distinctions of persons "established by law," the 1808 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Termtoiy of Orleans recognized that "slave" is not a natural category, inhering in human beings. It is an agreement among other human beings to treat one of their fellows as property. But the Digest did not specify how such a property right came into existence in a given instance. The definition of a slave was simply ostensive, pointing toward rather than …

Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

From French and Creole to Spanish, the domain of the Napoleonic Empire to the king of Spain, crossing the strait separating the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the Spanish colony of Cuba entailed a change of language and government. Some 18,000 people made that transition between the spring and summer of 1803 during the Revolutionary War in Saint-Dominque. Six years later, many crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to New Orleans and the recently acquired Louisiana Territory under the authority of a territorial governor and the United States Congress. What would these crossings lead to for those who had …