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Litigating The Meaning Of Emancipation: Reconstruction And Post Reconstruction Era Dilemmas Of Freed People And Property, Julie Novkov
Litigating The Meaning Of Emancipation: Reconstruction And Post Reconstruction Era Dilemmas Of Freed People And Property, Julie Novkov
Julie Novkov
This article explores how the southern courts managed the policy question of transferring property by bequest in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation. In the years when the infrastructure for Jim Crow was being assembled, many freedmen and freedwomen were able to gain access to property by bequest despite the system’s refusal to endorse broad based land reform. I argue, nonetheless, that these cases carried through a tradition of white patriarchal control of property, rather than heralding the uncertain dawn of a new era of racially egalitarian property rights.
Toward A Legal Genealogy Of Color Blindness, Julie Novkov
Toward A Legal Genealogy Of Color Blindness, Julie Novkov
Julie Novkov
Conservative colorblindness is often understood by legal scholars as a backlash phenomenon that emerged in the post-civil rights era in response to gains by African Americans in the legal and social spheres. Following Reva Siegel's work, this paper pushes the time frame back substantially and traces the origins of conservative colorblindness in legal doctrine to the early 1960s. It describes a discursive struggle that began in the courts and spilled out into the cultural arena, ultimately resulting in the full appropriation of colorblindness by the right.