Description:

Law was critical to the establishment and growth of American slavery. American judges authored roughly 10,000 appellate cases involving enslaved people and those cases continue to be cited by judges and lawyers and to serve as the basis for contemporary legal doctrine. Although thirteen percent of all published American cases are within two citations of a slave case, the significant influence of the law of slavery is almost never acknowledged by lawyers or legal scholars.

The Citing Slavery Project aims to uncover the history and legacy of the law of slavery. Once completed, our database of American slave cases available at www.citingslavery.org will offer open access to thousands of slave cases and give users the tools they need to analyze the continued influence of these cases on modern law. Slave cases are too deeply entwined in American law to excise their influence but ignoring their influence should no longer be an option.