Jordan Brewington, a 2021 graduate of the Yale Law School, has published Dismantling the Master's House: Reparations on the American Plantation, which won the YLS’s Michael Egger Prize, “awarded on the recommendation of the Board of Officers of the Yale Law Journal for the best student Note or Comment on current social problems.”
In southeastern Louisiana, many plantations still stand along River Road, a stretch of the route lining the Mississippi River that connects the former slave ports and present-day cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Black communities along River Road have long experienced these plantations as sites of racialized harm. This Note constructs a normative framework for local reparations that centers these descendant communities and explores the use of eminent domain to break up the landholdings of current plantation owners to make those lands available to descendants. Beyond the descendants in Louisiana’s river parishes, this Note is aimed at inspiring a discussion about reparations in other local contexts—across institutions, cities, and states—that are also sites of historical and continued subjugation.–Dan Ernst