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France, the United States, and Coming to Terms With Slavery

Posted: 25 Aug 2011 11:11 AM PDT

Ariela J. Gross, University of Southern California Law School, has published All Born to Freedom? Comparing the Law and Politics of Race and the Memory of Slavery in the U.S. and France Today as USC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-18. Here is the abstract.

Both the United States and France have seen a burgeoning of memorialization of slavery and abolition in recent years, and France has even passed a memorial law declaring slavery a crime against humanity. This Essay compares law, racial politics, and the memory of slavery in two nations trying to come to terms with their slave pasts. Despite important differences in their histories and civil rights regimes, I argue that in both France and the U.S., movements that oppose race-conscious law portray slavery as part of the deep past, and a generalized past detached from race, whereas those seeking some form of recognition or reparation emphasize that slavery is "not even past." In both countries, the originary revolutionary moment – in France, associated with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in the U.S. with the 1787 Constitution – is invoked to create a sense of the timeless continuity of the principle of colorblindness, with slavery (and race-conscious legal remedies today) temporary deviations.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The Development of Western Constitutional Ideas

Posted: 25 Aug 2011 11:07 AM PDT

Jean LeClair, Université de Montréal Faculty of Law, has published L'Avènement Du Constitutionnalisme En Occident: Fondements Philosophiques Et Contingence Historique (The Advent of Western Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations and Historical Contingency) in volume 41 of the Revue de droit de l'Université de Sherbrooke (2011). Here is the abstract.

Pour le bénéfice des non-initiés aux arcanes du droit constitutionnel occidental, l'auteur, après avoir brièvement décrit les notions de droit constitutionnel et de constitutionnalisme, s'attarde à retracer les idées-force qui, en Occident, ont rendu possible l'avènement de ces notions. Par la suite, il examine la trajectoire historique empruntée plus spécifiquement par les constitutionnalismes anglais, français et américain. L'auteur cherche ainsi à démontrer que, malgré la contingence historique du constitutionnalisme canadien, les principes philosophiques qui en sont à la source tirent leur origine de ce qu'on pourrait appeler un « patrimoine intellectuel occidental.

For the benefit of those unacquainted with the arcane features of Western Constitutional law, the writer, after briefly describing the notions of "constitutional law" and "constitutionalism", seeks to set out the fundamental ideas which have enabled these notions to develop in the Western World. He then examines the historical trajectory of British, French and American constitutionalism. In so doing, the author seeks to underline that, notwithstanding the historical contingency of Canadian constitutionalism, the philosophical ideas upon which it is grounded may be described as originating from a "Western intellectual patrimony."

Download the article from SSRN at the link. (NB: Text is in French).