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From the “Legal Culture of Slavery” to Black Legal Culture: Reimagining the Implications and Meanings of Black Litigiousness in Slavery and Freedom

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De la Fuente, Alejandro, and Ariela J. Gross. Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 282.
Edwards, Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 430.
Gross, Ariela J. Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; reprinted Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Pp. xi +263. $110.00.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2023

Myisha S. Eatmon
Myisha S. Eatmon*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States. Email: myishaeatmon@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

This review essay considers Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross’s Becoming Free, Becoming Black (2020); Laura F. Edwards’s The People and Their Peace (2009); Ariela J. Gross’s Double Character ([2000] 2006); Martha S. Jones’s Birthright Citizens (2018); Kelly M. Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott (2017); and Kimberly M. Welch’s Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (2018), arguing that one important implication of these works is that the roots of post-Reconstruction Black legal culture can be found during the antebellum period. The essay synthesizes the insights of these works regarding legal culture, legal consciousness, vernacular legal education, and legal networking. It concludes that, for students of Black legal culture and litigation for and by Black people beyond Reconstruction (that is, Jim Crow), examining the historiography of antebellum litigation for and by Black people is an important starting point in advanced discussions about Black legal culture.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 1428 - 1447
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

I would like to acknowledge the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, the J. Williard Hurst Summer Institute, Mitra Sharafi, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Reuel Schiller, Karen Tani, Regina Austin, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Tiya Miles, Emma Rothschild, and my fall 2022 African American Studies 184x class for the ways in which they have contributed to this review essay coming to fruition. Special thanks to Dylan Penningroth and Kimberly Welch for their insights as I fine-tuned this essay.

References

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