Search Records(12 total)
- Subject contains "Slave Law"
Christopher Span: Book Learning and Slave Education
Christopher Span, Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses his work, “Sam’s Cottonfield Blues” and “Quest for Book Learning: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.” He discusses why literacy was so feared by white enslavers and crucial to slaves. Detailing how slaves subverted the rules to learn to read while enslavers punished those who did. Prof. Span’s own family provides a powerful example of the rhythm and style of…
Samantha Pinto: Hemmings, Baartman, and Complicated Fame
Samantha Pinto is a Professor, Department of English and Director, Humanities Institute at University of Texas at Austin. Professor Samantha Pinto discusses her book, Infamous Bodies Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights. Using the idea of "vulnerability" as a touchstone to explain the celebrity of Sally Hemings and Sarah "the Hottentot Venus" Baartman, Prof. Pinto describes how each woman's agency is complicated by dominant systems of coercion and…
Ruth Colker: White Supremacist Constitution
Professor Ruth Colker, Distinguished University Professor and Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law, is one of the leading scholars in the country in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination. Professor Ruth Colker discusses her 2022 Utah Law Review article, "The White Supremacist Constitution." The United States Constitution is a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy. White supremacy constitutes a “political, economic and…
James Oakes: Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
James Oakes is one of our foremost Civil War historians and a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for his works on the politics of abolition. He teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He discusses his book, The Crooked Path to Abolition Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution. Beginning with the inclusion of the 3/5th clause and the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution there existed a tension between a proslavery and antislavery interpretation. How did…
Robert Pierce Forbes: Race and Jefferson's Notes
Robert Pierce Forbes taught U.S. history at the University of Connecticut and was the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Robert Pierce Forbes discusses his introduction, scholarship, and editorship of Thomas Jefferson's seminal work, "Notes on the State of Virgina." Prof. Forbes locates the origin of United States' racial dynamic in Jefferson's notes on race. Specifically, how Jefferson,…
Eric Foner: Reconstruction's Consititution
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is one of this country's most prominent historians. Professor Foner discusses his book "The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution." By looking at the history of debate and aftermath of each Post-War Amendments, Prof. Foner examines how each sought to permanently end American Slavery.
Jennifer Morgan: Motherhood and Slavery
Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Professor Morgan discusses recent journal article “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery." Exploring how Virginia laws developed to codify enslaved women's reproductive labor, by defining and…
Randolph McLaughlin: Slavery in the Virginia Colony
Prior to joining the Pace Law School faculty in 1988, Professor McLaughlin was an attorney associated with Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, with whom he did litigation and labor law work. In 1978, he began his legal career at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil rights/civil liberties legal organization in New York City. For eight years he worked side by side with the renowned civil rights attorney William Kunstler fighting for the rights of activists and the communities across the…
Paul Finkelman: Slavery and the Supreme Court
Paul Finkelman, the Chancellor of Gratz College, is the author of more than 100 law review articles, 100 other scholarly articles and more than fifty books. He is a specialist on slavery, civil rights and race relations, African American history, American Constitutional and legal history, the American Civil War, religious liberty, the history of religion in the U.S., American Jewish history, and legal issues surrounding baseball. The United States Supreme Court has quoted and cited his work in…
Atiba Ellis: Polley V. Ratcliff
Atiba R. Ellis is a Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. Professor Ellis discusses his essay "Polley V. Ratcliff: A New Way To Adress an Original Sin?" A fascinating court case, recently resolved, involving kidnapping, slavery, and freedom which might serve as a roadmap for a type of Truth and Reconciliation style reparation. Prof. Ellis explains how the past is still alive and able to be resolved today.
Alex Reinert: 8th Amendment Debate
Alex Reinert is the Max Freund Professor Litigation and Advocacy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Prof. Reinert discusses his article "Reconceptualizing the Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, and 'Cruel and Unusual' Punishment." Prof. Reinert talks about "the law of slavery" and how little we have travelled from the 1870s to today when it comes to the understanding of "cruel and unsual" punishment as the standard of imprisonment.
Sherri Burr: Free Blacks of Virginia
In 2015, she was awarded a Monticello Fellowship to conduct research on the Free Blacks of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who were free before the Civil War. Burr’s ancestors were among this group. Professor Burr discusses her research which became her 27th book, "Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619-1865."