Legal Mobilization of Enslaved Litigants: Ecclesiastical versus Civil Lawsuits

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

This project is a comprehensive survey, indexing and analysis of archived lawsuits brought by enslaved men and women in Lima, Peru between 1600-1700. The court documents to be surveyed are manumission cases, appeals for family unification, change of ownership petitions, and self-purchase lawsuits. The objective is twofold: first: to identify legal arguments that were successful for enslaved litigants given their condition of bondage and their negligible social, economic and political power, and second: to identify legal forums which were more favorable to slave claims, and the circumstances of occupation, residence, gender, and caste that enabled slaves to use these forums. The central hypothesis is that slave litigants' claims were often more successful in ecclesiastical courts than they were in secular courts, because they were brought within a religious and legal context that was deeply ambivalent about the status of slaves as humans vis-à-vis their status as property. Much of the debate in comparative slavery studies can be reduced to a central argument about which legal system was more favorable to liberty. Civil law systems created greater opportunities for manumission than the common law tradition of chattel slavery. Slaves in the British Caribbean and the US South hardly used the legal system to pursue their freedom at comparable rates to Latin American slaves. This research will provide empirical data about outcomes of slave litigation that can inform larger theoretical debates about the legal agency of colonial Latin American enslaved litigants, the ambiguity of slaves' legal personality, and the role of courts as protectors or detractors of slaveholders' interests. This data in turn will assist humanist and social science scholars in comparative slavery studies, by assessing the measurable performance of courts in denying or approving slave claims, and will deepen our understanding of the role of courts in times of social change more generally.