Slavery and the Law Conference Series 2022-2023
1 December 2022 – Property and Slavery: Citing Slavery Project, with Professor Justin Simard
Professor Justin Simard gave a guest lecture in Professor Yaëll Emerich’s Property / Les biens course. The lecture initiated second-year students to the Citing Slavery Project, which provides a database of slave cases and modern cases that continue to cite them as precedent. The project aims to confront the legal profession with its role in slavery, which has notably been done through fitting cases involving enslaved people into standard legal categories.
About the speaker
Justin Simard is an Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan State College of Law. He has a B.A. from Rice University, and a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Justin started the Citing Slavery Project to reveal the legacy of the law of slavery in American law and to make that research accessible to others. He hopes that the database will become a resource for researchers, family historians, and educators. Justin is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, Legal Economy: Lawyers and the Development of American Commerce, 1780-1870.
