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

The Nat Turner Trials

The Nat Turner Trials locates the trials of slaves in the wake of the Nat Turner rebellion in the context of common and statutory law and extralegal responses to slavery in Virginia and North Carolina during the early 1830s The Article shows how trials were part of the whole system of slavery held together by norms of white supremacy promulgated in the press the pulpit and on plantations Decisions from local courts to appellate courts gave broad power to slave owners to control enslaved people There was little done in defense of slaves though in some ways the states\u27 criminal procedure statutes and the actions of some slave owners and defense lawyers may have helped to limit the number of convictionsThe article is framed by two cases in North Carolina ” one in 1830 of a white man who attacked a slave in his custody and was freed from punishment and another in 1834 of a slave who killed his overseer and was found guilty of manslaughter rather than premeditated murder Sandwiched between those two cases was the Nat Turner rebellion in neighboring Virginia during August of 1831 The trials of those accused of rebellion and conspiracy along with the vigilante violence that accompanied the rebellion further illustrate the ways the legal system functioned to support slavery and orderThe article highlights how trials of slaves in the wake of the Nat Turner rebellion worked to reestablish order and to mete out punishment It also reveals how lawyers for the slaves labored ” largely unsuccessfully ” to free those most obviously not guilty Those lawyers were committed to the reestablishment of order all of the key lawyers had participated in the militia response to the rebellion Yet the defense lawyers still tried to limit convictions and they succeeded to some extentThe trials worked in conjunction with ” and sometimes in opposition to ” the extralegal violence that accompanied the repression of the rebellion The trials reveal as did the two Supreme Court of North Carolina cases that bookend this Article the conflicts within the community as some emphasized the power of slave owners to treat slaves as they wished while others emphasized the subjection of everyone including owners of slaves to the rule of law The court struggled in part with trying to keep the community from taking vigilante action It also acted to punish the rebels and stopping further rebellionThe trials tell compact linear stories about why someone is being punished or not The trials are obscure but collectively they tell a powerful story about the role of law in American history as a vehicle for establishing orde

Ranking Law Schools with LSATs, Employment Outcomes, and Law Review Citations

This Article offers an alternative to the much-discussed U.S. News & World Report rankings. Where U.S. News rankings are affected by a wide variety of factors —some of which are criticized as irrelevant to what prospective students care about or should care about—this Article looks to three variables: the median LSAT score of entering students, which seeks to capture the quality of the student body; the percentage of the graduating students who are employed at nine months following graduation at full-time, permanent, JD-required jobs (a separate analysis excludes school-funded positions and solo practitioners from this variable); and the number of citations to each school’s main law review, which seeks to capture a school’s recent reputation. It rank-orders each of those variables, averages those ranks to obtain a new ranking, and then compares those new rankings to those of the 147 schools analyzed in U.S. News & World Report in March 2014. It identifies the schools that improve and decline the most with the new ranking. This Article provides ranks for all 194 American Bar Association accredited law schools that U.S. News included in its rankings released in 2014, including the forty-seven schools that U.S. News put in its “unranked” category

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