Bluebook Rule 10.7.1 & The Citing Slavery Project

Posted on Posted in Legal Writing and Citation, National, Social Justice

Rule 10.7.1(d) of the Bluebook covers slave cases. For cases involving an enslaved person as a party, use the parenthetical “(enslaved party).” For cases involving an enslaved person as the subject of a property or other legal dispute but named as a party to the suit, use the parenthetical “(enslaved person at issue).” For other cases involving enslaved persons, use an adequately-descriptive parenthetical.

For example:

  • Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) (enslaved party), superseded by constitutional amendment, U.S. Const. amend. XIV
  • Wall v. Wall, 30 Miss. 91 (1855) (enslaved person at issue)

The rule was influenced by lobbying of Michigan State University law professor Justin Simard who is the founder of the Citing Slavery Project. The project provides a database of slave cases and the modern cases that continue to cite them as precedent.  According to Simard’s Stanford Law Review article on the topic (72 Stan. L. Rev. 79 (2020)) “Judges cite slavery to explicate the law of contracts, property, evidence, civil procedure, criminal procedure, statutory interpretation, torts, and many other fields. For the most part, judges cite these cases without acknowledging that the cases grew out of American slavery and without considering that a case’s slave origins might lessen its persuasive authority. Nor do they examine the dignitary harms that the citation of slavery may impose. In citing slavery, lawyers thus demonstrate a myopic historical perspective that creates legal harms and reveals the ethical limitations of their profession.”

Remember you can always view the Keycite or Shepard’s report for a secondary source to get primary and secondary sources that cite the secondary source.

Here is a brief list of related and recent academic articles to this topic:

 

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