Law Of Slavery Research Articles

Jurisdiction and Afro-Brazilian Legal Politics from Colonialism to Early Independence

Abstract Every empire in the Americas developed a law of slavery that connected the forced transoceanic migration of enslaved people with land-based economic production and social life. Competing conceptions of jurisdiction over land and sea emerged from legal processes regarding slavery in the transition from colonial Portuguese rule to early independence in Brazil. Both the Portuguese monarch and post-independence Brazilian ministers sought to assert jurisdiction over residents inside the territory, including enslaved people. Their attempts to do so created social conflicts in which enslaved people put forth their own visions of jurisdiction and justice. Afro-Brazilian people developed a legal politics that drew upon diasporic maritime connections to overturn enslavement. The legal politics of cases regarding uprisings and contraband slave-trading animated concerns among judges and imperial administrators about effective legal order. A revolutionary movement in 1798 contested Portuguese colonial sovereignty with a vision of free-trade popular sovereignty. The monarch’s transfer from Portugal to Brazil in 1808 opened a small route for enslaved people to petition the crown for freedom based on innovative readings of free soil. A major case of capture in 1851 illuminated how the naval court judge adjudicated the case as the capture of an enemy. Captive African people testified in court to gain collective freedom in a liminal space. These claims to freedom raised important questions about legal equality and freedom from illegal trafficking for all people held in slavery in Brazil.

State responsibility and strategy in preventing and protecting Indonesian fisheries crews working on foreign fishing vessels from modern slavery

ABSTRACT Work in the fisheries sector has had certain negative impacts, such as increased practices of human trafficking and modern slavery. Therefore, Indonesia’s Government needs serious improvements to protect Indonesian migrant fishing. The aim of this research are (1) to analyse how the state's responsibility in protecting and handling cases of modern slavery against Indonesian fisheries crew members who work on foreign fishing vessels? (2) To analyse how the role and strategy of the state in the future in preventing and protecting Indonesian fisheries crew members who work on foreign fishing vessels. This research uses normative research methods. The results show that the form of state responsibility is to ensure legal protection and by enforcing modern slavery laws. Indonesia's strategy in providing protection to Indonesian fisheries crew members who work on foreign vessels is to ensure that Indonesian fisheries crew members who work on foreign vessels get their rights and legal protection. In addition, it is necessary to confirm the authority, duties and functions between institutions that handle the governance of the placement and protection of fishery crew.

Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783

In this fascinating book, Lee B. Wilson argues (against popular and scholarly perception alike) for the existence of an English common law of slavery. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the English common law proved malleable enough to incorporate slavery. The common assumption that slave law had to be imported from foreign jurisdictions, Wilson argues, is flatly wrong. To prove her case, Wilson analyzes the South Carolinian legal system from the colonial era to the early republic. Instead of focusing on the proscriptive slave codes borrowed from Barbados and elsewhere, she examines property law, commercial transactions, vice-admiralty courts, equity jurisdiction, and the law of police. She consistently finds that English law provided a more-than-adequate framework for the incorporation of slavery. Property law was adapted in the colonial context quite readily. The Royal African Company treated enslaved people as goods and merchandise, and early laws in New York and South Carolina followed suit. There was some legal wrangling over whether to treat enslaved people as real or moveable property in the eighteenth century. In South Carolina, lack of legislative guidance led plantation owners and merchants to adopt the chattel principle by custom.

Ending disability segregated employment: ‘modern slavery’ law and disabled people's human right to work

AbstractDisability segregated employment (also referred to as ‘sheltered workshops’) violates disabled people's human right to work and employment. This article argues that modern slavery law might serve as one part of a broader strategy to end disability segregated employment, ensure accountability for the injustices within them and ensure equal access to open employment opportunities for disabled people. This is on the basis that disability segregated employment can be understood as a form of labour exploitation under modern slavery law – specifically forced labour and servitude. Modern slavery law is a useful legal tool to unseat deeply entrenched ableist attitudes of disability segregated employment as beneficial and necessary and build corporate/charity, public and government momentum towards the transition away from disability segregated employment, even if this particular area of law cannot itself legally compel the closure of sheltered workshops and an increase in open employment opportunities for disabled people.

The functions of modern slavery law: exploring the diverse expectations of New Zealand actors

ABSTRACT Building off fresh empirical research, including 15 interviews, this paper explores the diverse hopes and expectations that local actors articulated for anticipated new modern slavery legislation in New Zealand. It particularly highlights the expectations of three groups—civil society, the business sector and Government—who comprise the key actors driving the modern slavery law discussions forward. What emerges is a complex picture of competing and even conflicting expectations; sometimes made explicit, other times operating beneath the surface. The empirical evidence on the various expectations is then categorised in terms of the rich literature on the functions of law. Five core functions of modern slavery law are identified: the direct, expressive, symbolic, geopolitical and commercial functions. The paper identifies several policy implications of these diverse expectations and concludes with a call for greater clarity over what the law intends to achieve and how effectiveness should be measured.

Child soldiers as contemporary slaves: A human rights approach

Despite surging attention to child soldiers and modern slavery over the past decades, their links remain politicized and neglected. This study develops a human rights approach that deepens application of international slavery law; exposes child soldiering as a neglected slavery issue; and confronts underlying legal, political, and ethical challenges. It addresses challenges of using slavery law to identify contemporary cases, then analyzes global data on child soldiering specifically, revealing patterns and trends with robust equivalencies to slavery. Ethical challenges are addressed by confronting slavery myths that distort legal discussions and intersectional elements of child soldiering. These legal, empirical, and ethical arguments reveal international law on child soldiering as deeply insufficient and support a paradigmatic shift in thinking toward antislavery rights as appropriate legal, moral, and programmatic tools to end child soldiering. This, in turn, demonstrates how a rights-based approach helps fulfill the promise of anti-slavery law even in politicized cases.

Beyond Somerset?: Slavery and the Temporality of Law

This is an invited comment on Holly Brewer's LHR article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire.”

Forum: Holly Brewer's “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire”—Introduction

Historians have long since agreed that slavery was central to the social, economic, and political life of the English-speaking North American colonies, and then early United States. Yet the origins of North American slavery have remained far less clear. Holly Brewer's article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” which appeared in a recent issue ofLaw and History Review, attempted to clarify one key question within this puzzle. Did judges and legislatures in the colonies create their own institution of slavery? Or did they borrow from English precedent? For Brewer, the answer is clear: seventeenth and eighteenth century English judges, merchants, and others, in tandem with “crown policy,” built the institution of slavery that would be “a foundation for a common law of slavery in all English colonies and for the slave trade.” Slavery, in other words, was legal in England before theSomersetdecision. It would thus be legal in the British Empire.1

Slavery, Law, and Race in England and its New World Empire

This paper responds to Holly Brewer's article “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire.” Brewer traces a process begun by Charles I, in collaboration with his appointed judges, to legalize the buying and selling of people in England and its Empire. Brewer's work is a much-needed reconstruction of the legal precedents that transformed people into chattel, enabling the business of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet race does not receive any engagement as a category of analysis. Missing is an account of the historical processes whereby laws about slavery contributed to racial formation. Although the global expansion of the British Empire coincided with a new emphasis on rule of law and equality before the law, bound labor and persistent questions of race, gender, status, age, nation, and boundary called attention to the contradictions embodied in Enlightenment thought and its proclaimed universal values.

Racial Capitalism and the Contemporary International Law on Slavery: (Re)membering Hacienda Brasil Verde

ABSTRACT Refusal of abject commodification undergirds contemporary international law definitions of slavery and their growing linkage to international economic agreements through injunctions against the use of forced labor. Yet there are screaming silences in ongoing attempts to grapple with the prevalence and significance of contemporary slavery in the global economy. This contribution to the special issue on racial capitalism in international economic law calls for a reckoning with the past in the international law on contemporary slavery. By foregrounding resistances to erasure, and squarely addressing the significance of race to the perpetuation of slavery, this article seeks to harness their promise for a reconstruction of a contemporary law of slavery that understands racialization as offering an essential social justice challenge to the decommodification of labor.

Sustainable Fashion—Rationale and Policies

Sustainable fashion refers to efforts to minimize the fashion industry’s adverse environmental and social impacts. This entry describes the industry’s entire production chain: from polyester production, cotton growth and wasteful fashion consumption patterns to landfilling, where so many clothes end up. The entry characterizes the drivers behind the industry’s poor record regarding sustainability and employee exploitation, as well as new policies around the world designed to improve the industry’s performance These include the Australian Modern Slavery law, the French law prohibiting the destruction of textile surpluses and the New York Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act.

A Nation of Laws, and Race Laws

This article reviews the history of race laws in the United States as distinct from the rule of law, an idea found in the writing and speeches of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American PhD in economics (1921). We review the race laws of slavery, lynching, Negro Jobs, and the making of the Black ghetto. We highlight the life and writings of Alexander and other early African American economists as an example of the cost of racial exclusion in the economics profession and how it has impeded the production of useful knowledge about the workings of the US economy. (JEL J15, K38, N31, N32, N41, N42)

James Indian, “Answers”: An Indigenous Freedom Suit in Massachusetts Bay

Abstract Around 1670 an enslaved plaintiff called James Indian sued for his freedom in Massachusetts Bay. As his case languished, he found colonists willing to help him. The result of their collaboration, “James Indians answers to his Mr Carrs reasons of appeale,” offered a powerful critique of New England slavery law.

Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross

Reviewed by: Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross Felipe Alfonso and Paulo Henrique Rodrigues Pereira Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross. Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 295 pp. Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a comparative study on the interconnection between citizenship and racial subordination in slave societies. The book was cowritten by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross and builds on their previous work.1 Among the many contributions of the study, it is worth mentioning the authors' analytical shift from slavery to freedom. In Slave and Citizen (1946), Frank Tannenbaum explained the divergent modern race relations in the United States and Latin America as resulting from their distinct slave legal regimes.2 Over the years, revisionists criticized Tannenbaum for overemphasizing law at the expense of slave agency, whereas recent scholarship have been trying to synthesize these two variables. De la Fuente and Gross draw on the latter approach but reveal a major blind spot that have permeated the whole debate. For them, "it was not the law of slavery but the law of freedom that was most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law" (4). The book covers three and a half centuries in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, locations that developed "successful, brutal slave societies" (223). This broad scope allows the authors to investigate the legal constructions of the Spanish, English, and French colonial enterprises, and to unveil how these structures induced the different historical paths taken by each society. Drawing on extensive primary research, De la Fuente and Gross demonstrate that the historical outcomes were above all conditioned by manumission and communities of free people of color, insofar as these factors resisted elite projects to restrict black freedom and citizenship and to associate blackness with slavery: "The larger the community, the greater the opportunities for freedom" (221). De la Fuente and Gross indicate multiple variables that shaped the differing trajectories taken by communities of free people of color in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Yet they devote particular attention to the "mutual constitutiveness" (9) between legal traditions, politics and culture, and the agency of historical actors. In Cuba, the right to manumission was not tied to race, as in Virginia and Louisiana, because Iberian traditions mostly applied [End Page 327] the practice to the liberation of Christian or Muslim captives. Consequently, "communities of free people of color attained significant numbers in Cuba, while those in Virginia and Louisiana dwindled" (7). However, if the size of these communities were key to the expansion of freedom, how come slavery lasted longer in Cuba than in the United States? Although the authors do not address this question directly, one could infer from their rationale that the answer would lie in the vicissitudes of American sectionalism. By the 1830s, as a direct response to Northern abolitionism, Southern slaveholders started to articulate an explicit defense of slavery framed around the idea of "positive good," which helped enlist nonslaveholding white men in the support of a Southerner way of life. As white supremacy gathered momentum, the terms of black subordination were gradually reframed from property or status (slavery) to race (citizenship). Thus, while it is true that slavery lasted longer in Cuba, the laws regulating free people of color in the United States "also served as templates for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place" (224). The book leaves research openings for scholars to further explore. How did black claims to citizenship differ when one compares Cuba (a colonial regime based on census suffrage) with the United States (a democratic, constitutional, federal, and representative republic)? Did the expelling of people of color from the Americas suggest the absence of a labor deficit in the United States? Has an Atlantic law, constituted by European legal traditions and local dynamics of American colonies, been formed along the centuries? By avoiding the traditional notion that slavery was the main social factor governing slave societies, the book to work as an alternative to formulations in which slavery is the...

Searching Slavery Laws in British North America

Searching Slavery Laws in British North America

The Non-Punishment Principle as Cornerstone of a Robust European Modern Slavery Law Framework

A significant ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2021 (V.C.L. and A.N. v UK) reinvigorated the principle of non-punishment as a paramount tool in the prevention of modern-day slavery. This article attempts to crystallise how the principle can aid in recentring victims of human trafficking and other forms of physical and psychological abuse and, therefore, diminish the susceptibility of vulnerable people becoming such victims in the first place, disguised as perpetrators themselves, although being exploited for criminal activity. While ending impunity through criminalisation is one important tool in combating the existence of modern slavery (I), states need to incorporate other stipulations into their national legislation in order to provide a robust framework (II). The most crucial of these ingredients is the principle of non-punishment, which needs to be understood as an all-englobing shield applicable to all stages of criminal investigations. The principle needs to gain a more authoritative standing in national and European legal frameworks, as shall be demonstrated in the comparison between a deficient 2015 ruling by the High Court of Ireland and the ECtHR’s 2021 V.C.L. and A.N. v UK decision (III).

Detention of Private Persons by Private Persons as a Delictual Wrong: Liability for Deprivation of Liberty in Scots Private Law

Jonathan Brown is a lecturer in Scots Private Law at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Previously he was a lecturer in law at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. Jonathan considers himself to be a private law generalist and dabbling legal historian. His recent publications include work on medical jurisprudence, the law of defamation and the relation between the Roman law of slavery and modern Scottish human trafficking legislation. The present essay is intended to provide a modern account which places acts amounting to wrongful detention effected by private persons within the taxonomy of iniuria.

Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire

The current historical consensus is that English common law was somewhat confused, but that coerced servitude was legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach, because it was “beyond the line” of English justice. The common law is characterized by an effort to see continuity and consistency, and historians (despite our natural desire to track change) often look for those patterns too. Such efforts to provide a consistent overview of an England that was free and colonies that created slavery on their own—have obscured the vibrant struggle over slavery within the English judicial system—the common law—over more than a century. Not only did the common law on slavery change profoundly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the common law became an instrument of crown policy. It did so within a federal empire, wherein colonial legal norms had to adhere, in crucial ways, to that common law. English high court judges thus provided the legal foundation for an imperial common law of slavery that allowed people to be deemed absolute property. That definition of people as property was closely connected to absolutism, both in theory and practice. In theory the absolute power of kings over subjects was connected to that of masters over slaves. In practice, the crown's use of the courts to create laws without parliamentary consent (to bypass parliament) also increased crown revenue and thus their independence from parliamentary control. These powerful legal mechanisms made it possible to “recover” enslaved people as assets for debts, a legal definition that was essential for a market in people to function sucessfully. This history reveals the absolutist character of early capitalism, and the extent to which the character of capitalist development depends on the legal rules that define markets and justice.

메타비평, 해체, 트랜스텍스트성으로 읽는 노예법

This essay reads the slavery laws in the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes with key words such as polyphony, construction, metacriticism, deconstruction, and transtextuality. We first observed inconsistencies within the slavery law in Exodus 21. The beginning part of the law talks about the possibility of liberation of male slaves and guarantees rights of the slave-wife taken before another one, presenting the slave owner as a generous man. But then the law regulating the owners’ violence against women and men slaves assumes that all slaves are exposed to excessive and regular violence. For us, the coexistence of the slave laws of the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes in the Pentateuch with more differences than similarities powerfully demonstrates the polyphony of the Bible.<BR> We argued that the slavery laws as disciplinary discourses enculturate values and construct identities. The slavery laws construct class and hierarchy, serving the interest of the rich male slave owner. While the owner is constructed as both generous and violent, the male slave is constructed as one with low self-esteem, having to say that he loves his owner as he chooses to become a permanent slave. The female slave is constructed as lower than the male slave and is sexualized, being subject to her owner sexually.<BR> We observed metacritically how western scholars’ interpretations and commentaries come from their male, middle class, and western backgrounds, and how they remain in the ideologies of the text. Above all, they tend to identify themselves with the slave owner, the subject of the law. Their male-centered interpretations construct the abandoned slave-wife as the body with which they are entitled to sexual pleasure.<BR> We read the slavery laws transtextually with the Hagar-Abraham and the Jacob-Laban narratives. Abraham is described as stingy and passive, unable to protect his slave-wife Hagar and his child Ishmael. Laban is described as a (slave) owner who would not send off his (slave-like) Jacob with gifts. The characterizations of these male figures undermine the male slave-owner who was constructed as both generous and powerful by the slavery laws. Thus we argued that the narratives deconstruct and relativize the laws.

Transnational corporations and modern slavery: Nevsun and beyond

ABSTRACT A recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada Nevsun Resources Ltd. v Araya, has brought the issue of transnational corporations’ responsibility for human rights violations to the forefront in Canada. After critically examining the decision, this article aims to propose an effective legislative design for Canada. The article also examines another pertinent decision (this one from the UK), Vedanta Resources plc. v Lungowe in this regard. The proposals for effective legislation in Canada set out in this article will also be relevant for other countries considering the introduction of (or amending) modern slavery laws.