Law Commons^™

Moore-Mulligan-Brown Collection (Mss 219), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 219. This collection consists chiefly of correspondence of the Moore, Mulligan, Brown and Johns families, who are interrelated. The correspondence deals chiefly with family matters and events occurring in Trigg County, Kentucky and Allen County, Kentucky.

Sex And Slavery: An Analysis Of Three Models Of State Human Trafficking Legislation, Melynda H. Barnhart

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Slavery As Immigration?, Rhonda V. Magee

Rhonda V Magee

Slavery as Immigration? In this essay, the author argues that transatlantic slavery was, in significant part, an immigration system of a particularly pernicious sort -- a system of forced migration immigration aimed at fulfilling the nascent country's needs for a controllable labor population, and desire for a racialized one. As such, the law and policy of chattel slavery should be viewed as perhaps the most important historical antecedent to contemporary immigration law regarding low- and unskilled labor in the United States. Following an analysis of the treatment of chattel slavery in general immigration history scholarship, and in scholarship on the …

Life Is Precious, Donna L. Landry, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Killing History: The Effect Of Slavery And Wwii On The Death Penalty In America And Europe, Julie Turley

Global Honors Theses

The author examines the cultural and social factors that have impacted the United States’s and European Union’s opposing stances on capital punishment. Particular focus is paid to the United States’s history of race relations and views on economic inequality and to the influence of World War II on the EU’s human rights and welfare policies. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the US may enact its own path to abolition.

Joyce Apsel On To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories By Today's Slaves. Edited By Kevin Bales And Zoe Trodd (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 2008). 260pp., Joyce Apsel

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today's Slaves. Edited by Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 260pp.

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 …

The 39th Congress (1865-1867) And The 14th Amendment: Some Preliminary Perspectives, Richard L. Aynes

The 39th Congress Project

No abstract provided.

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

D. A. Jeremy Telman

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 of …

Bankruptcy Bondage, Margaret Howard

Scholarly Articles

Initially, it might seem an affront to the history of slavery in this country to suggest that similar concerns are raised by an expectation that debtors pay their debts. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the Bankruptcy Code present genuine constitutional difficulties under the Thirteenth Amendment. These difficulties have been recognized for several decades, albeit as a matter of speculation. Now, however, un- der the 2005 Amendments to the Bankruptcy Code, this issue is no longer speculative. Under the 2005 Amendments, an individual debtor may be put into a chapter 11 proceeding involuntarily, and re- quired to make payments under a plan …

Ain’T No Peace Until We Get A Piece: Exploring The Justiciability And Potential Mechanisms Of Reparations For American Blacks Through United States Law, Specific Modes Of International Law, And The Covenant For The Elimination Of All Forms Of Racial Discrimination, Dekera Greene

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Microhistory Set In Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane is a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz’s Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This essay borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the …

The End Of Reparations Talk? - Reparations In An Obama World, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

Disparities in Black health began in slavery, were reinforced in segregation and racism, and persist today despite significant remedial efforts. In the last decade, the statistics about Black health disparities show no improvement. The caustic history of slavery, racism and segregation hasn't been completely undone. Fundamental changes are still necessary to repair deficits in Black health.

But the election of Barack Obama has changed the relevance of reparations as a political tool for making these changes. We elected a Black man as President, and he refused to apply reparations talk to social programs of uplift for disadvantaged communities. Obama struck …

Can We Talk? How Triggers For Unconscious Racism Strengthen The Importance Of Dialogue, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Strader V. Graham: Kentucky's Contribution To National Slavery Litigation And The Dred Scott Decision, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In 1841, three Kentucky slaves in Louisville boarded a steamboat bound for Cincinnati. Within days, they had made their way to Detroit and then to permanent freedom in Canada. Their owner, a prominent central Kentucky businessman, soon tracked them down and tried to lure them back to bondage in the United States. When these efforts failed, he sued the steamboat owners for the value of the lost slaves in a Kentucky court. After ten years of litigation, this case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court’s decision in favor of the Kentucky slaveholder would prove to be an important precedent …

Determining The (In)Determinable: Race In Brazil And The United States, D. Wendy Greene

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In recent years, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education. These states established admissions quotas in public universities for Afro-Brazilians or afrodescendentes. As a result, determining who is "Black'' has become a complex yet important undertaking in Brazil. Scholars and the general public alike have claimed that the determination of Blackness in Brazil is different than in the United States; determining Blackness in the United States is allegedly a simpler task than in Brazil. In Brazil it is widely acknowledged that most Brazilians are …

Strader V. Graham: Kentucky's Contribution To National Slavery Litigation And The Dredscott Decision, Robert G. Schwemm

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Color Of Our Future: The Pitfalls And Possibilities Of The Race Card In American Culture, Christopher A. Bracey

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

We live in a country haunted by a past of slavery, segregation, racism, and violence. Though many systemic corrections have been attempted, a large percentage of African-Americans continue to fall behind their White counterparts in nearly every index of socio-economic well-being. The debate rages on as to why this situation exists and persists, and people on both sides of the color divide have become increasingly sensitive to perceptions and accusations of racial injustice. In his book, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, Richard Thompson Ford explores the phenomenon called “the race card,” wherein individuals play …

Slavery As Punishment: Original Public Meaning, Cruel And Unusual Punishment, And The Neglected Clause In The Thirteenth Amendment, Scott W. Howe

Scott W. Howe

Steadfast originalists agree that the original meaning of our constitution's language, once found, should be followed, even when it leads to unhappy outcomes. Yet, in a famous lecture in 1989, Justice Scalia, a leader in the modern originalist movement, cast doubt on the duty of fidelity to originalism. He asserted that the originalist judge can appropriately avoid outcomes that are "too bitter" either by deferring to precedent or by temporarily abandoning originalism. Ironically, libertarian and liberal originalists have been among the most dismissive of Justice Scalia's faint-heartedness. They contend that the problem is the narrow approach to originalism that Justice …