• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Child Abuse As Slavery: A Thirteenth Amendment Response to DeShaney

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    Child_Abuse_As_Slavery____A_Th ...
    Size:
    1.756Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Amar, Akhil
    Widawsky, Daniel
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/229
    Abstract
    The Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution is a "grand yet simple declaration of the personal freedom of all the human race within the jurisdiction of this government." In a single stroke, the Amendment outlawed the "peculiar institution" of southern chattel slavery - auction blocks, overseers, iron chains, and all. Yet the Amendment is more than a mere nineteenth-century relic, written only to reform a "peculiar" time and place. Its framers' disgust with "the peculiar institution" led them to announce a more universal, transcendent norm: slavery, of all forms and in all places, shall not exist. Emancipation did not discriminate by age; the Amendment freed minors as well as adults. Nor did the Amendment discriminate on the basis of familial status; many slaves in 1865 were mulattoes fathered by white slavemasters, yet they were also plainly protected. The Amendment embraced not only those slaves with some African ancestry, but all persons, whatever their race or national origin. Its sweeping words and vision prohibited not only forced labor for the master's economic enrichment, but all forms of chattel slavery - whether the ultimate motive for such domination, degradation, and dehumanization was greed (as in the cotton market) or sadism (as at the end of a lash). Finally, the Amendment compelled abolition of even "private" enslavement perpetuated not by the force of law, but by the violence of master over slave. The de facto condition of slavery, the Amendment commanded, shall not exist in America. Therefore, as we shall show in greater detail below, the Thirteenth Amendment in both letter and spirit extends its affirmative protection to a slave even if: (1) the slave is a child, (2) the slave child is the offspring of the master, (3) the slave child has no African roots, (4) the slave child is not used to maximize the master's financial profit, and (5) the child's enslavement is de facto, and not de jure. One such slave child was Joshua DeShaney.
    Collections
    Faculty Scholarship Series

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2025)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.