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Law & Humanities Blog

Redefining "Indian-ness"

Posted: 30 May 2011 11:38 AM PDT

Gregory Ablasky, University of Pennsylvania, has published Making Indians 'White': The Judicial Abolition of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia and its Racial Legacy at 159 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1457 (2011). Here is the abstract.




This article traces the history of a series of "freedom suits" brought by Virginia slaves between 1772 and 1806, in which the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia judicially abolished nearly two centuries of American Indian slavery in the colony by ruling that slaves who could prove maternal descent from Native Americans were prima facie free. Delving first into the legal history of Indian slavery in colonial America, it then examines the doctrinal shift that led the courts to redefine natives as unfit subjects for enslavement, and argues that its roots lie in a racialization of slavery that separated Africans from Natives.
The final section explores the national legacy of these rulings, tracing the spread of these legal principles throughout the antebellum United States and discussing how the racial ideology that divided Native Americans and African-Americans continues to pose legal hurdles in contemporary Indian law cases involving tribal recognition and the Cherokee freedmen.Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The King James Bible and the Founding of the Republic

Posted: 30 May 2011 11:28 AM PDT

Bernard M. Levinson, University of Minnesota, and Joshua A. Berman have published The King James Bible at 400: Scripture, Statecraft, and the American Founding in the History Channel Magazine, November 2010, at page 1. Here is the abstract.

This short article addressed to a broader readership investigates the impact of the King James Bible upon the American founding. In order to show that impact, the article's first half portrays the political context for the formation of the King James, charts the influence of the Bible upon early modern political thought, and then sketches the impact of the KJV upon the rhetoric and political thought of the Founders. The essay is accompanied by a timeline.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili On the Global Legal Community

Posted: 30 May 2011 11:17 AM PDT

Andreas Wagner, Goethe University Frankfurt, Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders," has published Francisco De Vitoria and Alberico Gentili on the Legal Character of the Global Commonwealth, in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2011). Here is the abstract.


In discussing the works of 16th-century theorists Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili, this article examines how two different conceptions of a global legal community affect the legal character of the international order and the obligatory force of international law. For Vitoria the legal bindingness of ius gentium necessarily presupposes an integrated character of the global commonwealth that leads him to as it were ascribe legal personality to the global community as a whole. But then its legal status and its consequences have to be clarified. For Gentili on the other hand, sovereign states in their plurality are the pinnacle of the legal order(s). His model of a globally valid ius gentium then oscillates between being analogous to private law, depending on individual acceptance by states and being natural law, appearing in a certain sense as a form rather of morality than of law.
The full text is not available for download from SSRN.
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