Reconstructing Local Government

After the Civil War, the South faced a problem that was almost entirely new in the United States: a racially diverse and geographically integrated citizenry. In one fell swoop with emancipation, millions of former slaves were now citizens. The old system of plantation localism, built largely on the feudal control of the black population by wealthy white planters, was no longer viable. The urgent question facing both those who sought to reform and those who sought to preserve the Old South was: What should local government look like after emancipation? This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee reformers went south with the explicit aim of remaking the fabric of southern culture by rebuilding the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers rewrote state constitutions to replace the plantation and county court with townships modeled on the New England town. Southern conservatives resisted the new townships, understanding them as foreign impositions targeted to destroy their old way of life. Within a decade they had dismantled the new townships and built the foundations of a new Jim Crow local order rooted in the county and approximating a return to the plantation. By telling this new history, this Article contributes to present scholarship in at least two ways. First, the story highlights a binary struggle between communitarian localism embodied in the civic participation of the New England town and \u27 oroprietary localism embodied in the private power of the plantation owner. This struggle was framed with crystal clarity during Reconstruction, but it remains a powerful analytic tool for understanding today\u27s debates and struggles over local government. Second and relatedly, this history reveals the extent to which racial anxiety shaped and continues to shape local institutions. The communitarian township experiment was fueled by a vision of racial equality-and the white supremacist response to it was fueled by resentment and resistance to that vision. When we think about localism and racial inequality, we tend to think about the responses to school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century when racial resentment and fear during the Second Reconstruction drove white flight and contributed to resegregation through suburbanization. This Article shows that we may be looking at the wrong Reconstruction. In fact, the pathologies of local government, racial segregation, democracy, and protection of property were framed after the Civil War, in the crucible of a direct conflict between utopian racial egalitarianism and white supremacy

Judicial Solidarity?

We are living in a moment where open and principled resistance to law and legal order are a part of our daily lives. Whether in support of Black Lives Matter or in opposition to mask mandates, people are in the streets resisting. Over the last decade, the perception of the fixity of our legal order has eroded and so, too, has the stability of our consensus that legality and morality are aligned. In this moment, the visibility and viability of resistance to law and civil government through social movements have surged. With the increasing salience of civil resistance resurfaces an old question: can (and should) judges seek to stand in solidarity with movements engaging in civil resistance? The classic answers to this question take two forms. Judges should either enforce the law and punish the civil resister, or, if they cannot do so in good conscience, they should resign. These answers position the judge outside of and aloof from the political and social struggles that the resisters represent. It follows from this aloof position that judges cannot be in solidarity with civil resistance aimed at legal change in their official capacity. This Article questions the stability of the mainstream conclusion. By focusing my attention on judicial responses to civil resistance against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I return to one of the most influential sources of our collective sense of judicial capacity for political resistance. Through my own original archival research, I revisit Robert Cover’s conclusions about judicial timidity in Justice Accused. Against extensive evidence confirming Cover’s bleak view, I expose and examine one judge’s contrary argument. That judge, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, was a neighbor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, and he wrote in conversation with, not against, the strident views of the famous advocate of civil disobedience. Hoar proposed that a judge in sympathy with civil resistance should enforce the law in order to effectuate the power of the resistance. He argued that making Thoreau’s theory of change work required sympathetic judges to enforce the law to expose its injustice. From this colloquy between judge and activist, I draw the beginnings of a counternarrative of how judges may strive towards (if not achieve) solidarity with resistance movements. Judges, like any other institutional actor, have the capacity and perhaps the obligation to be strategic about how they act within and against the social movements that find their ways into their courtrooms

A Commons in the Master’s House

Almost everyone who reads these words is an institutional insider in some form. Those of us who aspire toward transformation, liberation, and resistance from our institutional settings are forced to confront Audre Lorde’s striking admonition that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” For some, finding themselves in the master’s house is a spur towards purism—a rejection of institutional power in search of a “pure” remove from which to critique it. For others, it is a dispiriting check on their aspirations and an invitation to sullen fatalism. This Essay questions whether we are bound to the hard consequences of purism or whether there are avenues within our institutional infrastructure that allow us to pursue change with radical pragmatism. Canvassing my own historical work on the struggle against slavery in the 1850s, I advance the beginning of an answer: it may be that it is impossible to revolutionize the institutions we work in as insiders, but it is possible for institutional actors to hold deliberative space within their institutions for transformational and radical imagination. By deliberative space, I mean space held open for conversation, democracy, and participatory deliberation. None of us, alone, can imagine our way out of the master’s house. But together, by stepping back and making space, we may be able to open a commons in the master’s house where we listen, dream, and challenge each other

Judicial Solidarity?

We are living in a moment where open and principled resistance to law and legal order are a part of our daily lives. Whether in support of Black Lives Matter or in opposition to mask mandates, people are in the streets resisting. Over the last decade, the perception of the fixity of our legal order has eroded and so, too, has the stability of our consensus that legality and morality are aligned. In this moment, the visibility and viability of resistance to law and civil government through social movements have surged. With the increasing salience of civil resistance resurfaces an old question: can (and should) judges seek to stand in solidarity with movements engaging in civil resistance? The classic answers to this question take two forms. Judges should either enforce the law and punish the civil resister, or, if they cannot do so in good conscience, they should resign. These answers position the judge outside of and aloof from the political and social struggles that the resisters represent. It follows from this aloof position that judges cannot be in solidarity with civil resistance aimed at legal change in their official capacity. This Article questions the stability of the mainstream conclusion. By focusing my attention on judicial responses to civil resistance against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I return to one of the most influential sources of our collective sense of judicial capacity for political resistance. Through my own original archival research, I revisit Robert Cover’s conclusions about judicial timidity in Justice Accused. Against extensive evidence confirming Cover’s bleak view, I expose and examine one judge’s contrary argument. That judge, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, was a neighbor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, and he wrote in conversation with, not against, the strident views of the famous advocate of civil disobedience. Hoar proposed that a judge in sympathy with civil resistance should enforce the law in order to effectuate the power of the resistance. He argued that making Thoreau’s theory of change work required sympathetic judges to enforce the law to expose its injustice. From this colloquy between judge and activist, I draw the beginnings of a counternarrative of how judges may strive towards (if not achieve) solidarity with resistance movements. Judges, like any other institutional actor, have the capacity and perhaps the obligation to be strategic about how they act within and against the social movements that find their ways into their courtrooms

Resistance Lawyering

This is the story of a group of abolitionist lawyers who devoted themselves to working within a legal system that they considered to be fundamentally unjust and illegitimate. These “resistance lawyers” used the limited and unfriendly procedural tools of the hated Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to frustrate, oppose, and, if possible, dismantle the operation of that law. Abolitionist resistance lawyers were forthrightly committed both to ensuring that their clients remained free and to using the cases that arose under the Fugitive Slave Law to wage a proxy war against the institution of slavery. Their daily direct service practices were inextricably linked to their movement politics and aspirations for systemic reform. Using new archival research that upends the existing historical consensus, I show that this linked practice was dramatically more effective than previously thought, both in protecting individual clients and as a means of building political opposition to slavery in local and national politics. This history should serve as a provocation for contemporary resistance lawyering. Many lawyers today practice within a legal system that they oppose in the hope of frustrating or dismantling that system. I suggest that today’s resistance lawyers can learn from the abolitionists’ integration of politics and daily practice as they fight to increase the political power and salience of their own work

An Outrage Upon Our Feelings : The Role of Local Governments in Resistance Movements

After the election of 2016, many who opposed President Trump and his policies argued that local governments and local power would be the best tools to resist those policies and strengthen democracy. Among the most prominent acts of local resistance in the last decade have been resolutions that declare a town or a city a “Sanctuary” and refuse to cooperate with federal authorities in the deportation of undocumented immigrants. This Article situates these resolutions in a long tradition of local opposition to state and federal laws that towns and cities deem unjust by examining local opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Drawing on original archival research, this Article exposes striking similarities between contemporary tactics of local resistance and the tactics of local governments in 1850–1851 that passed formal resolutions opposing the Fugitive Slave Law. This examination of how local governments responded to the Fugitive Slave Law poses two broad questions: what did local governments think they were doing when they passed these resolutions? And how much power did local governments really have to achieve those goals? The answers to these questions are complex and context specific. The local struggles that resulted in these resolutions were part of an ongoing political struggle against the seemingly intractable problem of slavery. The local resistance chronicled here is exceptional neither in its heroism nor its effectiveness. Rather it is striking in its familiar messiness and ambition. In some cases, towns seemed to have modest expressive goals that could be met by their resolutions. In other cases, the towns’ resolutions seem to suggest a much broader set of substantive goals that were beyond the power or capacity of the town to achieve. Examining these responses to the Fugitive Slave Law offers a new analytical perspective on local responses to the deportation crisis. Examining what local governments think they are doing when they pass sanctuary ordinances and comparing that with what they are empowered or willing to do helps us think more clearly about how and by what means local governments can resist national policies and engage in broad political struggles

A Commons in the Master\u27s House

Almost everyone who reads these words is an institutional insider in some form. Those of us who aspire toward transformation, liberation, and resistance from our institutional settings are forced to confront Audre Lorde’s striking admonition that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” For some, finding themselves in the master’s house is a spur towards purism—a rejection of institutional power in search of a “pure” remove from which to critique it. For others, it is a dispiriting check on their aspirations and an invitation to sullen fatalism. This Essay questions whether we are bound to the hard consequences of purism or whether there are avenues within our institutional infrastructure that allow us to pursue change with radical pragmatism. Canvassing my own historical work on the struggle against slavery in the 1850s, I advance the beginning of an answer: it may be that it is impossible to revolutionize the institutions we work in as insiders, but it is possible for institutional actors to hold deliberative space within their institutions for transformational and radical imagination. By deliberative space, I mean space held open for conversation, democracy, and participatory deliberation. None of us, alone, can imagine our way out of the master’s house. But together, by stepping back and making space, we may be able to open a commons in the master’s house where we listen, dream, and challenge each other