The Ship, the Slave, the Legal Person
ISBN: 978-1-80262-868-5, eISBN: 978-1-80262-867-8
Publication date: 28 March 2022
Abstract
In the first decades of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, the US Federal and Supreme Courts heard several cases on the legal status of ships. During this period, Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story determined that a ship was a legal person that was capable to contract and could be punished for wrongdoing. Over the nineteenth century, Marshall and Story also heard appeals on the illegal slave trade and on the status of fugitive slaves crossing state lines, cases that raised questions as to whether enslaved peoples were persons or property. Although Marshall and Story did not discuss the ship and the slave together, in this chapter, the author asks what might be gained in doing so. Specifically, what might a reading of the ship and the slave as juridical figures reveal about the history of legal personhood? The genealogy of positive and negative legal personhood that the author begins to trace here draws inspiration and guidance from scholars writing critically of slavery. In different ways, this literature emphasises the significance of maritime worlds to conceptions of racial terror, freedom, and fugitivity. Building on these insights, the author reads the ship and the slave as central characters in the history of legal personhood, a reading that highlights the interconnections between maritime law and the laws of slavery and foregrounds the changing intensities of Anglo imperial power and racial and colonial violence in shaping the legal person.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the participants at ‘Interrupting the Legal Person Workshop’ held at the University of Victoria (June 2019) for their generous questions and comments, and especially George Pavlich and Richard Mailey for the invitation. Many thanks also to participants in the Critical Studies Programme at the Sandberg Institute, University of Amsterdam, and at the Department of Law, University of Leeds for listening attentively and for engaging with my ideas. My deepest gratitude to Riaz Mavani for discussions on shipping and insurance, to Mikki Stelder for reading and commenting on earlier versions, and to Austin Sarat for his ongoing patience. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their close readings and for pushing me to clarify and refine my arguments.
Citation
Mawani, R. (2022), "The Ship, the Slave, the Legal Person", Sarat, A., Pavlich, G. and Mailey, R. (Ed.) Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 19-42. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-43372022000087B002
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022 Renisa Mawani