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Cardozo Law Review

Abstract

In his Article The First Slave (And Why He Matters), Professor Jonathan Bush returns to a persistent question in the history of the colonial Chesapeake: the status of blacks in the seventeenth century. He frames this question, however, in a new way. Rather than seeking to determine whether or not blacks were slaves before the codification of slave law-a largely unanswerable question that revolves, at least in part, around what one means by "slaves"-he asks, how could the English have imposed slavery on blacks in America when slavery was non-existent in England and under English law? In response, he points to the "comity principle," which "allowed deference to be given to some or all foreign legal norms." "Through that door," he concludes, "slavery could be admitted."

Keywords

Legal History, Property--Personal and Real, Slavery, Race and Ethnicity Issues, Constitutional Law

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | Law | Law and Race | Legal History

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