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Cardozo Law Review

Abstract

This is a commentary on some issues raised by Anthony De V. Phillips's "Doubly Condemned": Adjustments to the Crime and Punishment Regime in the Late Slavery Period in the British Caribbean Colonies and Judith K. Schafer's "Under the Present Mode of Trial, Improper Verdicts are Very Often Given": Criminal Procedure Trials of Slaves in Antebellum Louisiana, both of which appear in this volume. Both discussions highlight the role of criminal law, procedure, and punishment in helping to sustain systems of African and Afro-American chattel slavery in New World societies. They provide interesting contrasts between civil and common law approaches to criminal law issues and particularly criminal law issues in slave societies. And they provide a window from which we might gauge the importance or lack of importance of criminal law, and indeed law more generally, to the lives of the millions who for nearly four hundred years toiled as slaves on the plantations of the New World.

Keywords

Criminal Law and Procedure, Slavery, Race and Ethnicity Issues, Law and Society, Cuba

Disciplines

Criminal Law | Criminal Procedure | Law | Law and Race | Law and Society

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