Often, in recent years, we have used this third column for the discussion of what I think of as "structural" constitutional issues, leaving for the fourth column the more rights based constitutional issues. I won't make that distinction this time. There was really only one structural case worth discussing, in my own unappealable opinion. There was the tribal sovereignty issue of US v. Cooley . After that I will turn to rights based matters that come from amendments other than my favorite, other than the first. Tribal Sovereignty Tribes have been doing rather well in the Supreme Court recently, as a group of sovereignty-venerating Justices treat the notion of their sovereignty more seriously than it has sometimes been taken. McGirt v. Oklahoma is the first instance of this to come to mind. This year brought another tribal win: Cooley . The court said that police officers for a tribe have the power to search and to temporarily detain non-Indians on public rights-of-way ...
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I'm going to attempt to go up to three posts a week for now. Elizabeth Chika Tippett, of the University of Oregon School of Law, has written a new article available at SSRN, Enslaved Agents . The article begins with the fact that between 1798 and 1863, in the slave states of the US (and CS), certain slaves would conduct business negotiations and conclude transactions on behalf of their owners. This, as one might expect, sometimes became fodder for litigation when one party to a deal wanted an escape clause, since they could not reasonably have expected a court to hold them to promises made to a chattel. But that argument doesn't seem to have done them any good. Some of the specific situations Tippett mentions are fascinating. Consider the case of "Robert Gordon, an enslaved man who profitably managed a coal yard, and in exchange was allowed to sell the 'slack' coal on his own behalf, through which he purchased his freedom." So he not only managed the coal ...
Recently, new texts, wax tablets, have surfaced that throw unexpected light on the legal system in place in Roman Britain. The word "surfaced" has its literal meaning here. They were dug up on the site of what was to become Bloomberg's European headquarters in London. The "Bloomberg tablets" include: • WT 29: a letter from a slave to a master about cattle as investment; • WT 30: a letter about a loan that has seemingly affected someone’s financial reputation; • WT 35: a note of a deposit (!) using the term arra of 200 denarii. • WT 44: a written acknowledgement of a debt incurred as a consequence of a sale of goods; • WT 45: a lex locationis for the transport of goods from St. Albans to London; • WT 50: a receipt for rent collected by a slave in relation to two farms; • WT 51: a praeiudicium together with the source of the jurisdictional competence (the Emperor) • WT 55: some sort of promise (maybe a stipulation?) • WT 57: a procuratio (with some ...
Much of what we know or think we know about Nat Turner, and the slave rebellion to which he gave his name, derives from a single written source, a pamphlet by Thomas Ruffin Gray. In a recent research paper for UC Berkeley, Christopher Tomlins has discussed "whether a hastily-written twenty page pamphlet rushed into print by an opportunistic white lawyer, down on his luck and hoping to cash in on Turner's notoriety, actually deserves to be treated as empirically reliable...." Tomlins starts with the basics: beginning very early in the morning on August 22, 1831. Turner led a group of blacks, most of them slaves (Billy Artis was the free man in the group) in massacring the whites in slave holding families that morning. The massacre occupied them for 12 hours, the rebellion after that consisted of repeated confrontations with militia. By the afternoon of August 23, Turner was the only member of the group who had neither been killed nor captured. He eluded authoriti...