Compromise at the Boundaries of the Law of Bondage, Essay Review of Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (1981)

Abstract

During the past decade, no topic in legal history has been treated with more intensity or with more success than the law of slavery. The irony of legal constraints on masters and judges in combination with shackles on slaves makes slavery law particularly provocative. The record of conscientious attempts by lawyers and judges to rationalize and to decide cases, when human beings were "considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property," provides incomparable evidence about basic jurisprudential issues as well as about the political and intellectual history of the antebellum period.1