Academic

Student Blogger - #13Amend Live Blog: History and Legal History

Legal historians focus almost exclusively on original intent, particularly by focusing on the statements of legislators. Professor Eric Foner described himself as merely a historian who sometimes poses as a legal historian. As a pure historian, he thinks this focus is decontextualized. The national changes leading to the Thirteenth Amendment did not stop in 1865; they continued forward through the whole of Reconstruction. Taking a conservative reading of these acts goes against the tenor of the times. Passing the Thirteenth Amendment was not a conservative measure; a newspaper at the time viewed the passage of the Amendment by the Senate as a rebuke to the less aggressive actions put forward by the Lincoln Administration. The Amendment operated immediately and nationwide and said nothing about colonization of former slaves to Africa or a period of apprenticeship for the freemen. Furthermore, the abolition movement envisioned a national state with single citizenship, and free labor ideology fed into the movements at the time as well. A multiplicity of views emerged outside of the halls of Congress. The Thirteenth Amendment seems like a promising area of research because it has not been narrowed by subsequent conservative legal history and interpretation.

Full post as published by The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog on April 18, 2009 (boomark / email).