Master Calendar

Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, University of Michigan

What is the precise process by which law came to recognize a claim of property in a person, enabling the powers attaching to a right of ownership to be lawfully exercised? Building upon judicial and notarial records from early nineteenth-century New Orleans, Rebecca Scott develops the stories of the girl named Sanitte and the young woman named Adélaide Durand, both of whom had become legally free during the Haitian Revolution. Upon arrival as war refugees in Louisiana, each faced the prospect of enslavement under U.S. law. In the case of Sanitte, the task was accomplished, and she would be sold and then re-sold five times between the ages of 16 and 19. Adélaide Durand, by contrast, managed to defend her own freedom through a sequence of legal proceedings, drawing on an ingenious reading of the civil law concept of prescription. Scott argues that the experiences of these women, and the pattern of exercise of "unlawful power" over them, provide a glimpse into the intricacy of the relation between law and slavery, as well as certain lessons for the understanding of contemporary slavery in the world of the twenty-first century.

Co-sponsored by the Yale Law School.