Triangle Legal History Seminar

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 f

Please join us for the next meeting of the Triangle Legal History Seminar, this Friday, February 10 , at the National Humanities Center from 4-6 pm. Anna Johns Hrom, J.D., is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Duke University.  She will be presenting a chapter from her dissertation, "Through Tort Hell and Back: The Rise and Fall of the Consumer Class Action in Alabama," entitled "Alabama is Open for Business." This chapter is a historical case study tracing the political battle over Alabama’s first comprehensive tort reform package.  A major component of this story is the rise of a new business lobbying group that sought to build a conservative “grassroots” social movement around the issue of tort reform.  This battle over tort reform would ultimately reshape both the state’s law and its political order.  This chapter is part of a larger dissertation project, "Through Tort Hell and Back: The Rise and Fall of the Consumer Class Action in Alabama,