Events
Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Affective economies and Litigation in the Early Modern Iberian Empire.
How could enslaved women assert legal claims to personhood, wages, and virtue, when the law regarded them as mere property? Under what conditions did the civil law of slavery create opportunities for slaves to demand liberty and justice in a judicial forum? How did children born to enslaved women, but freed at young ages navigate between different stages of dependency? These are questions raised during this presentation, which will focus on enslaved women as legal actors within the landscape of Hispanic urban slavery: women who were socially disfavored, economically active (and at times modestly prosperous) and extremely litigious. A retrospective look at their freedom suits tells us how enslaved women and children strategically exploited the rhetorical power of liberty through recourse to the law, although their lived realities were decidedly unfree and unequal.
Michelle McKinley
Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law
The University of Oregon
Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 was published by Cambridge University Press. She is the incoming President of the American Society for Legal History