Slavery and Race in American Law

This course explores the relationship between enslavement and racialization in American law. The course starts from the premise that American slavery was an institution that enlisted law in support of power and exploitation. As the institution transformed over time, so did the contours of the law. The course first examines the early-modern Atlantic world, where we compare the legal regimes of slavery in the British, French, and Spanish empires. We work to understand the manner in which race was developed as a concept used to mark the divide between enslaved and free persons. We then narrow our focus to the British Atlantic world. We set out the complex relationship between slavery and race in American law from the colonial period to the Constitution to the Civil War and emancipation. Next, we trace the afterlives of slavery in law and legal decisions on race in the period that followed its formal end. We conclude with reflections on the presence of slavery and its durable effect in decisions on race in American law up to the present. We use various kinds of documents to structure our inquiries, from statutes and law codes to legal treatises and appellate opinions, to works of scholarship and the first-person narratives of persons who have been enslaved.