Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

7-26-2015

SSRN Discipline

English & American Literature Research Network; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; LIT Subject Matter eJournals; Sustainability Research & Policy Network; Legal Scholarship Network; PRN Subject Matter eJournals; Philosophy Research Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; SRPN Subject Matter eJournals; AARN Subject Matter eJournals; Humanities Network; Social Responsibility of Business eJournals; Anthropology & Archaeology Research Network

Abstract

"Antislavery Women and the Origins of American Jurisprudence is an essay review of Sarah Roths Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture Cambridge University Press 2014 It assesses Roths account of the dialog between antislavery and proslavery writers Roth finds that the antislavery and proslavery writers were joined in their depiction of enslaved people in the 1820s and early 1830s as savage people who threatened rebellion But as antislavery writers shifted to portray enslaved people as humble citizensinwaiting the proslavery writers responded with an image of the plantation as a family This critique turns to southern judges and treatise writers to provide a slightly different picture which shows that while the public face of the proslavery movement may have been of happy enslaved people the hardnosed economic and legal side continued with the initial image of enslaved people This became particularly salient as the south moved towards Civil War Roth perceptively portrays the shift in the North that led to increasing calls for African American freedom and citizenship and the rise of empirical critiques of law which became central to postwar jurisprudence That is the antislavery white women in Roths study injected empirical as well as humanitarian considerations into jurisprudence Meanwhile in the southern courts the reaction to calls for citizenship resulted in increasingly dramatic efforts to deny citizenship and ultimately in a secession movement along the lines sketched by southern legal thinkers

Download

Share

COinS