{"id":5197,"date":"2010-02-12T02:47:37","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T02:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=5197"},"modified":"2012-03-24T18:49:15","modified_gmt":"2012-03-24T18:49:15","slug":"legal-transplants-slavery-and-the-civil-law-in-louisiana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=5197","title":{"rendered":"Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana"},"content":{"rendered":"

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
\nWorking Paper 32
\nMay 2009
\n37 pages<\/p>\n

Ariela J. Gross<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Law and History
\nUniversity of Southern California Law School<\/em><\/p>\n

Can Louisiana<\/a> tell us something about civil law<\/a> vs. common law<\/a> regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction \u201ctransplanted\u201d in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a \u201cBlack Code<\/a>,\u201d first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans\u2019 three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre<\/a><\/em> (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law.<\/strong> This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum<\/a> and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the \u201claw in action\u201d? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves \u2013 manumission, racial identity, and \u201credhibition\u201d (breach of warranty) \u2013 to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.<\/p>\n

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner\u2019s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met \u201cany Negro\u201d who \u201clift up his hand against any Christian.\u201d In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto<\/a> children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.<\/p>\n

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard.<\/strong> In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as \u201cfree people of color\u201d in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire paper here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series Working Paper 32 May 2009 37 pages Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History University of Southern California Law School Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[459,1467,369,6,14,6940,20],"tags":[873,96,2120,20754,892],"class_list":["post-5197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-law","category-louisiana","category-new-media","category-papers","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-ariela-j-gross","tag-france","tag-frank-tannenbaum","tag-louisiana","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}