AMH 3558

Written assignment

Assignment: You are a young lawyer, working as a clerk for a judge in Florida in 1859. The judge has just been assigned a case involving a slave, Jubilee, who was injured while working for a man who was not his master. Jubilee’s owner, Frank Little, had leased Jubilee to Joe Plaza, to work in Plaza’s turpentine business. According to the agreement between Little and Plaza, Jubilee would only work as a loader, putting containers of turpentine into wagons for transport. But on the day Jubilee was injured, Plaza told him to go into the pine forest to help men move logs they were sawing down. While Jubilee was in the forest, one of the trees that had been sawed through fell on him and broke his arm and leg. Normally, men sawing trees down call out a warning to others just before the tree falls, to give a warning that the tree is about to fall. But the man who was sawing this tree down forgot to call out the warning, so Jubilee had no chance to get out of the way.

Remarkably, no Florida judge has ever had a case involving an injured slave before and so the judge has asked you to look at two recent decisions by courts in Georgia and Kentucky, and to write him a memo that gives him a sense of how those other states handle the problems raised by this case.[1]

The two cases are Scudder v. Woodbridge, a case from Georgia that was decided in 1846, and Louisville and Nashville Railroad v. Yandell, a case from Kentucky decided in 1856. (They are linked to this document.)

Write a memo to the judge explaining what the two cases seem to say about who is liable for injuries to slaves, when and why. Your memo should focus on analyzing the outcomes and analysis in the two cases as completely as possible, but you can (and should) also refer to other cases we read for class to offer support for your interpretations. You might want to consider the following issues: Did the courts emphasize the same sorts of issues and theories in the two cases, or were their rationales different? Have you seen similar reasoning employed in any of the other cases we have read in this part of the course (since the Brewer book)? If so, which case or cases, and what are the points of resemblance?

Your memo should have a cover page, with the following material on it

From: Your name

To: The Judge

Re: Little vs. Plaza

Date

Do not put your name on any other page of the memo. You should number each page of your memo, and your r paper should be roughly 5-7 pages long (not counting the cover page). It should be typed, single-spaced, and in a traditional font size (12 pt Times Roman, for example). It is do in class, at the start of class, on Oct 26. Papers handed in at the end of class, or later that day, will be dropped a half a grade. Papers handed in any day after they are due will be dropped a grade for every day they are late.

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[1] Many of you will find this task uncomfortable, particularly since the case law so easily equates people with property. One of the challenges of history, and legal history in particular, lies in trying to understand points of view and reasoning that is offensive to modern ears. One of the important lessons of legal history involves understanding law’s complicated relationship to all elements of life, and that often includes dealing with laws that endorse positions that as individuals or as a society we find repugnant.

We are not asking you in this assignment to endorse slavery, or the law of slavery’s reduction of people to property. On the contrary. What we are asking you to do is try to understand the legal logic that underlay the law of slavery, particularly with respect to the ways in which courts distinguished enslaved and free labor and the reasons for those distinctions. That distinction had serious consequences for both free and unfree workers.

For those of you who are interested in this area of law, and wish to explore its troubling aspects and influence on the legal profession, there are two books that you may wish to read. (Neither will help with this particular assignment, these are merely offered as supplemental reading for those of you who want to understand the tragic consequences of slave law more completely.) One is a book by Robert Cover, called Justice Accused. That book explores the reasons why judges in northern states upheld laws that protected slavery and slaveholders. The second is a book by Mark Tushnet, called the American Law of Slavery, it explores the ways in which, over time, judges were forced to confront the implications of legal rules that reduced people to property.