Panel 1: Courts and Imprisonment

Spencer Jacob Weinreich
The paper recovers the presence and the power of solitary confinement within American slavery. It reveals enslavers’ keen interest in the theories and practices of the penitentiary, inviting prison history to explore the vaster range of institutions and forms that carcerality could take.

Carolyn Ramsey
Professor Ramsey argues in her forthcoming book that, before the mid-twentieth century, the main targets of the criminal legal system’s intervention in intimate relationships were men whose violence transgressed the ideal of the protective male breadwinner. This paper, derived from a book chapter, explores the altered response to domestic abuse in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s and contends that waning sympathy for battered women and new concern about men’s emotional and mental fragility came from a complex interaction of ideologies, including psychological theories of violence, women’s claims to equality, and conservative efforts to impose a home-centered role on the wives and mothers of Cold War America. Government reluctance to punish perpetrators of domestic assault and femicide, which second-
wave feminists decried in the 1970s and 1980s, constituted a relatively recent shift away from the flawed, paternalistic attempts to curb violence against women that were common before mid-century.

Anne Twitty
How did southern jurists during the early national and antebellum eras reckon with northern gradual emancipation statutes—laws adopted in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey that declared children born to enslaved mothers free but bound to serve until a specified age? Decisions in freedom suits based on such laws reveal a judiciary struggling to make sense of the various forms of unfreedom that existed alongside slavery, whether and how gradual emancipation statutes altered the condition or status of the children of gradual emancipation as well as their mothers, and far-reaching issues of comity, citizenship, and statutory interpretation. The inherent legal complexity of such cases was compounded by the fact that southern jurists sensed that particular outcomes might wreak havoc on slavery but couldn’t easily decipher which outcome best got them to where they were hoping to end up.

Chair: Greg Ablavsky , Stanford Law School