Skip to main content

Rebecca Scott at TLHS, Feb. 24

By
The next meeting of the Triangle Legal History Seminar will be this Friday, February 24, at the National Humanities Center from 4-6 pm.  Our presenter will be Rebecca Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of Law at Duke University for spring 2017.

Her paper is entitled "Luisa Coleta and the Capuchin Friar: Slavery, Salvation, and the Legal Adjudication of Status":

This essay explores the adjudication of status, asking to what extent the exercise of authority under slavery was constrained by law. Was the Caribbean war refugee named Coleta a slave, or was she a free woman? When a Capuchin friar prepared to administer the last rites at Coleta’s deathbed in Havana in December of 1816, she refused absolution, instead obliging the friar on pain of conscience to transcribe her final confession and submit her words to a judge in order to initiate a suit for freedom for her children. The record thus created reveals the deep indeterminacy of status, the entanglement of the law of property with the law of persons, and the limits of legal process in a slave society.

Please find the paper here.  Contact Ashton Merck if you have questions or need access to the paper.

We look forward to seeing you on Friday!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Gilmartin, Sept. 9

By
Please join us for a discussion of David Gilmartin's paper "Voting and Party Symbols in India" on Friday, September 9, from 4-6 pm at the National Humanities Center.  Light refreshments will be served. Voting and Party Symbols in India:  The Visual and the Law in Constituting the Sovereign People Abstract: The establishment and legal regulation of voting practices provides a critical window for analyzing the distinctive meanings attached to the people’s sovereignty as an operative force in electoral democracies.   In India, this is evident in the controversies that have surrounded the use of officially-sanctioned party electoral symbols in election campaigns.   Originally adopted after India’s independence to facilitate voting by a largely illiterate population, symbols have since come to play critical roles as party logos.  But their practical use and “misuse” has sparked considerable controversy, raising questions both about t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mandy Cooper at TLHS, Friday, April 21

By
The next meeting of the Triangle Legal History Seminar will be this Friday, April 21, at the National Humanities Center from 4-6 pm.  Our presenter will be Mandy Cooper, PhD Candidate in History at Duke University. Her paper is entitled "The Family State: Family Credit and the Public Good in the Antebellum U.S.": What you'll be reading is the fourth chapter of my dissertation. My dissertation as a whole uses emotions as a lens to examine the economic and political work done by elite families in building the U.S. in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. I focus on two large family networks - the Coles and the Camerons - which were centered in the South, spread across the U.S., and extended across the Atlantic. My introduction will have the main historiographical points as well as introduce the different individuals in these large families. Since there won't be much background on many of the individuals in this chapter, I've included the attached...
Post a Comment
Read more