Slavery and the Law Seminar

3 units

Drop deadline: 11:59 p.m. on the day after the first class session. This course introduces students to the common law of American slavery. It focuses on the daily disputes that juries and judges adjudicated to demonstrate how slavery saturated southern law, encompassing not only conflicts over freedom and race, but also inheritance, mortgages, marriage, torts, contracts, and property. In the process the course continually returns to what we expect from a society governed by the rule of law while engaging some of the major debates that have dominated slavery studies over the last thirty years. These include the salience of race versus class in American slavery; its similarities and differences from other enslaving cultures; whether to characterize it as a totalitarian legal and political system; the extent to which those parts of the nation that preceded the South in abolishing slavery could be characterized as "free"; whether slavery was "efficient"; its impact on Black culture, especially on the Black family; slavery's gender and class effects; the possibility of love and erotic desire under slavery; questions of resistance by enslaved people; and, of course, the role of law in implementing, reinforcing, and sustaining slavery. Weekly readings include cases and treatise excerpts, as well as secondary scholarly sources. Requirements: Each student will write four assignments, including a book review or short research paper and three shorter analyses of historical, legal, and scholarly documents. Class participation and attendance also will be taken into account in the final grade. [This course contains 5 or more hours of BCCCR instruction.]