2,870 research outputs found
Considering William and Mary\u27s History with Slavery: The Case of President Thomas Roderick Dew
Amidst the recent apologies for slavery from the legislatures of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Alabama, New Jersey, and Florida, there is significant controversy over the wisdom of investigations of institutions\u27 connections to slavery and apologies for those connections.\u27 The divide over attitudes toward apologies falls along racial lines. This Article briefly looks to the controversy on both sides of the apology debates. Among those questions about investigations of the past, universities occupy a special place. Efforts at recovery of their connections to slavery include a study released by graduate students at Yale University in 2001,2 a report by Brown University\u27s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,3 and the University of Virginia\u27s Board of Visitors\u27 spring 2007 apology for that institution\u27s connections to slavery.4 These efforts lead to a question about whether other schools ought to consider self-investigations. The College of William and Mary is a particularly good place to ask such questions. This Article focuses on Thomas R. Dew, first a professor, then president at William and Mary from 1828 to his early death in 1846. Dew is the author of Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832, one of the most reprinted arguments on slavery in the years leading into the Civil War. He is also the author of one of the most comprehensive and important histories published in the United States in the nineteenth century, A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations. Through Dew we can gauge the intellectual connections to slavery, and then ask the important question: what-if anything-is an appropriate institutional response today? We can use Dew\u27s thought to begin a discussion of the virtues and pitfalls of apologies and to assess the value of talk of the connections to the past
Reparations Talk: Reparations for Slavery and the Tort Law Analogy
This Article examines the current landscape of reparations for slavery, identifying the contours of reparations lawsuits and exploring the ability of tort law to help apportion moral culpability in the reparations context. It first examines several possibilities for lawsuits for Jim Crow, discussing constitutional requirements and identifying specific incidents such as lynchings and Jim Crow legislation-that might be appropriate subjects of litigation. The Article then assesses the viability of obtaining reparations through tort and unjust enrichment claims by addressing issues such as causation and damages, exploring the obstacles presented by American law\u27s liberalism, and identifying the various goals of reparations advocates. Finally, the Article moves beyond litigation to contemplate the ability of tort law to serve as a vehicle for framing discussions about moral culpability. It concludes with an optimistic assessment of the role of tort law in the reparations movement
Reconsidering Reparations
Eric Posner\u27s and Adrian Vermeule\u27s essay, Reparations for Slavery and Other Historic Injustices, seeks a framework for defining reparations and evaluating reparations claims. It explores a limited set of past reparations, as well as the connections between those asked to pay reparations and past wrongdoers, and the connections between those receiving reparations and those injured in the past. Posner and Vermeule use that framework to evaluate the morality of reparations and the legal problems that arise in implementing reparations proposals.
This Essay takes up the Posner-Vermeule analysis at several points. It challenges their limited definition of reparations and their limited catalog of reparations in American history. In contrast to Posner and Vermeule, who date the origin of reparations action in the United States to 1946, this Essay presents a series of legislative reparations throughout American history. Using that historical evidence and a legislative model of reparations, the Essay proposes a relaxation of the relationship between wrongdoer and payer, and injured and recipient. Then it suggests several factors for a legislature to consider in designing reparations for historical injustice. This Essay, thereby, proposes an alternative framework for evaluating the morality and utility of reparations
- …