Nowhere in legal history has the nexus between past and present received more attention in recent years than in the study of slavery. The memory of slavery has become a field of study in itself, and competing histories of slavery have animated contemporary legal and political debates. Today, new histories of capitalism have further illuminated the central role of slavery and the slave trade in building the modern Atlantic world. Across Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, new memorials, museums, and commemorations of slavery and abolition have brought new kinds of public engagement to the slave past. In the era of Black Lives Matter, understanding the connections between that past and the present day has never seemed more important, and historians are struggling with the question of how to engage the present in a historically nuanced way. One kind of engagement between past and present, among historians, lawyers, and activists, has been to draw connections between slavery in the past and in the present.

This article explores a core question in the law of slavery: how was an individual's status as slave or free socially discerned and formally adjudicated? Under the doctrine of “freedom by prescription,” a person who had in good faith “lived as free” could argue that the absence of exercise of ownership for a specified term of years extinguished a prior owner's title. In the medieval Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Wise, which continued as a legal point of reference in Louisiana well after the end of Spanish rule, both the law of status and the law of property confirmed this path to freedom. From 1808 onward, Louisiana jurists and legislators sought to eliminate the remnants of the doctrine, but it lingered in popular and even judicial consciousness. The 1853 kidnapping of a woman named Eulalie Oliveau, six of her children, and eleven of her grandchildren for sale in the New Orleans slave market brought the question of “freedom by prescription” back into the courts. The awkward resolution of that case, and the uncertain fate of Eulalie Oliveau and her children, foreshadowed Reconstruction-era struggles over the content of legal freedom and the rights that freedom might bring to those who had once been held as property.

The La Plata River Basin, bordering Uruguay and Brazil, was the site of constant disputes between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns into the eighteenth century. The conflicts dated back to the seventeenth century with the founding of the Colônia do Santíssimo Sacramento on the left bank of the river. Although both sides engaged in diplomatic efforts over the years, these were not enough to prevent war, and there were ongoing battles interspersed with short periods of calm until the end of the 1860s and the so-called Paraguayan War (1865–70).

On March 2, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed a bill outlawing the African slave trade. Opponents of the traffic rejoiced that the bill was passed at almost the same time as a similar anti-slave-trade bill in Britain. As one Philadelphia newspaper put it, “Thus, will terminate, on the same day, in two countries of the civilized world, a traffic which has hitherto stained the history of all countries who made it a practice to deal in the barter of human flesh.” Efforts to end the African slave trade in the British colonies of North America dated back to the 1760s, proceeded in fits and starts, and resulted from a wide range of motives. In contrast to Great Britain, the United States 1807 bill was not the result of a long, hard-won, popular abolition campaign. However, despite a series of laws intended to curb the trade, eventually making the United States laws the world's toughest, smugglers continued to bring enslaved Africans into the South after 1808, and, more significantly, American vessels played a crucial role in the massive illegal slave trade to Cuba and Brazil during the nineteenth century. The impact on the United States economy was not inconsequential, but even more important was the trade's impact on the Atlantic economy, fueling the rapid economic growth of Cuba and Brazil in the decades that followed.

“The Mediterranean, central to the development of human civilization and lovingly celebrated in Euro-American historiography, from the viewpoint of human oppression has been a veritable vortex of horror for all mankind, especially for the Slavic and African peoples. The relationship was in no way accidental.”

Today, millions of migrant workers, some of them caught in debt bondage, some victims of fraud or forced migration, and others simply desperate for a better life elsewhere but instead finding themselves working for below subsistence wages or no pay at all, could be called modern-day slaves. Campaigns to end modern-day slavery have taken many forms. Most visibly, what is sometimes called “the new abolitionism,” constitutes a strand of modern antislavery and antitrafficking movements that draws often on the analogy between these workers’ plight and chattel slavery in the Atlantic world.

This symposium issue is first and foremost about crossing boundaries. The people readers have met in these pages—enslavers and enslaved, traders and purchasers, abolitionists and insurrectionaries—were mobile, and their mobility had consequences. The slave traders who changed flags as they moved across international waters are only the most visible exemplars of this phenomenon. Crossing geographic borders often meant crossing boundaries of race and status as well. All of these articles in one form or another address the question of what it means to cross lines: between “slave” and “free,” “legal” and “illegal,” “past” and “present.”

The crop lien was more than a strange fruit of emancipation, a hard-fought compromise, or a pragmatic choice. Its legal logic rested on several generations’ experience with capitalist social relations in the antebellum North, where intense pressures on land use in urban cores and their agricultural hinterlands promoted contestation and experimentation in the ancient body of landlord–tenant law. Northerners designed the crop lien as a way to disentangle contract from property: to strip the lease of its common law guarantee of exclusive possession and shift the burden onto tenants to bargain for it.1

During the period at issue in this paper–the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when trial juries were first employed in English felony cases–felonious homicide was a catch-all category, with no formal distinction drawn between murder and manslaughter. Nevertheless, juries did distinguish among different types of homicide as they sorted the guilty from the innocent, and the irremediably guilty from those worthy of pardon. Anger was one of the factors that informed this sorting process. This paper builds upon an earlier analysis of the meaning of felony, which posited that the medieval paradigm of felony was an act that involved deliberation and forethought, an exercise of a person's reasoning capacity and volition in the absence of necessity, and moral blameworthiness. Anger complicates this scenario. On the one hand, anger was seen to be a product of an ill-formed conscience. This potentially placed anger within the felonious area of moral blameworthiness. On the other hand, anger in its more extreme manifestations was seen to inhibit a person's ability to reason and to inspire behavior resembling insanity, thereby possibly pointing toward a partial excuse. This paper takes a fresh methodological approach for the study of emotion in the common law, placing legal texts within a broader cultural context in order to illuminate the concerns and priorities of jurors.

In 1885 and 1886, two trials helped to precipitate a vigorous debate about when criminal proceedings should be closed to the public and when press reports on such cases should be restricted or banned altogether. First, the trial of the artist Gustav Graef for perjury and inappropriate relations with underage models featured sensationalized press reports that provoked a firestorm of public criticism. Soon afterward, press coverage of the trial of a Danish spy, Christian von Sarauw, revealed compromising details about German military planning and outraged government officials. The result was the proposal of a new law to limit public and press access to trials which posed a potential danger either to public decency or national security. Despite vigorous government efforts, this new legislation repeatedly stalled in the German Reichstag, in part because of concerns about protecting legal transparency and freedom of the press. The debates surrounding this law demonstrate the extent (and limits) to which liberal ideals such as legal transparency and freedom of the press had become embedded in Imperial German society and also the substantial power of the German Reichstag to obstruct the will of the government–even in making new laws deemed vital for national security.

Sixteen-year-old Acre resident Mustafa Naif, suspected of having sex with another man, stated before the police investigator on June 30, 1943, “I know Mustafa Zaharan and is my friend and mate, I used to love him and he used to love me, and that this man had a sexual intercourse with me twice with my consent and free will, because he loves me and I love him.”1 By the time of his trial, approximately a month later, Mustafa Naif must have realized this was the “wrong” story to tell. He recanted his statement and denied knowing Mustafa Zaharan or having anything to do with him. His denial might have been another manifestation of love, as an admission of guilt would have led to his friend's conviction on a sex offense. For his lover's sake, then, Mustafa Naif might have renounced his original romantic version. Indeed, his friend was acquitted as a result of the contradictory statements; however, Mustafa Naif was charged with perjury and was convicted after pleading guilty.