Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law

Only a few decades ago, it was possible to write accounts of the culture or economy of the antebellum South which barely mentioned slavery or omitted the peculiar institution altogether. Today, slavery and race are rightly seen as central questions for the entirety of Southern-indeed American-history. Much of the scholarly attention to slavery has focused on the law. Historians have quarried legal records, including cases, statutes, probate inventories, and records of debtors\u27 sales, for a wide range of social and economic history research projects. But scholars also have examined late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave law, Northern as well as Southern, for the legal reasoning and intellectual underpinnings of slavery. How did the common law permit, explain, and classify this uniquely problematic form of property? And how did mandarin appellate judges, so often the heroes of legal scholarship, apply their professional skills and moral sensibilities to cases involving slaves? The interpretive efforts have yielded diverse and often brilliant views, but the scholarship shares the assumption that the law was an important social institution buttressing slavery and that the precise configurations of slave jurisprudence therefore matter. This article approaches slave law with the contrary premise that, in the critical first century of English colonial slavery, the common law had very little of importance to say about slaves, and it seeks to explore the significance of that unexpected silence. Unlike many other slave societies, colonial America never developed a systematic law of slavery. Early American slave law was largely reactive and, in particular, played little role when the choice was made in the seventeenth century to turn to slavery. Rather than focusing on what substantive law of slavery existed, this paper instead explores how emigrants from the densely legalistic culture of the English common law erected slavery without direct legal authority. It asks how they and their descendants, unlike colonists elsewhere in the New World, maintained slavery without the sanction of a thorough slave law. If accurate, this claim that common law was irrelevant describes a seemingly paradoxical state of affairs. English society was intensely \u27law-minded\u27, obsessed with legal considerations, legal rights, and legal remedies. Early seventeenth-century Englishmen regarded law and litigation as a principal means of dispute resolution, and the volume of litigation in royal courts continued to grow. Litigants sought more than speedy resolution; they seem to have viewed the law as an important means of social interaction. In the words of one leading historian, litigation had everything that war can offer save the delights of shedding blood. It gave shape and purpose to many otherwise empty lives ... [and] remained the most popular of indoor sports . . . . The swaggering, quarrelsome frontier entrepreneurs who clawed their way to the top of colonial Southern and Caribbean society shared these values, and they too were law-minded, using local courts and law to consolidate property and position. And of course slaves and indentured servants were valuable investments for planters, capable of yielding enormous profits though raising unusual legal issues. For these practical reasons, we might expect a slave law to develop not long after the inception of slavery as an institution

Take This Job and Shove It : The Rise of Free Labor

A Review of The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 by Robert J. Steinfel

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Let\u27s Get Real: Using Usability to Connect Writers, Readers, and Texts

The article discusses the application of the concept of usability and user-centered design in the interaction between the writers and the readers in the English classroom. It is inferred that the interaction with readers is essential during the process of writing. The elements of effective lessons on usability and user-centered design are highlighted

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Professional Collaborative Writing: Teaching, Writing, and Learning -- Together

The article discusses the significance of writing professionally and collaboratively in English learning. It states that if people consider writing as just an individual act, they miss the big part of the value of professional writing. It says that oftentimes, professional writing explicitly represents an organization. It adds that collaborative writing involves the work of two or more members of a team

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Good Writing: The Problem of Ethics

The article focuses on good writing in the English classroom. It mentions that the way to know if one has good writing is to see how the audience reacts to it. Writing professionals argue that good writers anticipate readers\u27 reactions as they shape style, page design, and content and every aspect of their writing. It notes that one of the main goals in professional writing is to teach students to use of rhetoric tools to influence their audiences and to emphasize ethical decision-making

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Are You a Writing Bully? Considerations for Teachers and Students

The article focuses on discussing the implications of bullying in writing when teaching professional writing in English classrooms. It states some of the forms of bullying include through memorandums with threatening and aggressive languages, forwarded emails aiming to embarrass, and general directives. The authors relate their experiences of being bullied and as a bully to others. It presents examples to help students consider issues related the audience, format, and timing in writing

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Designing a High School or Middle School Course (or Unit) in Professional Writing

The article offers information on the development of professional writing course in English middle school or high school classroom. It mentions that a good syllabus not only provide answers to basic questions, but also to questions that Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins have pertained to as the essential questions. It notes that students learn from writing activities and assessments including how to write in genres, evaluate the settings of professional tools, and manage their writing processes

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Student Writers as Problem Solvers in Literature Classrooms

The article reports on the role of student writers in the U.S. to enhance the study of literature in the classroom. High school teacher Dawn Reed shares how students\u27 professional writing served as a starting point for deeper study and advocacy of American literature. It provides an overview of Katie Greene\u27s assessment system that creates flexibility while providing a model of evaluation which can be adapted for other professional writing experiences