James Patrick Callahan, a third-year student at the Boston College Law School, has just published his note, Antebellum Enigma: Justice Woodbury Davis, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, and the Antislavery Constitution, in the Boston College Law Review:
In 1856, abolition activist Woodbury Davis joined the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) and quickly became its most radical member. Davis was an antebellum enigma: a high-ranking judge who advocated for Black voting rights, rejected the federal consensus that Congress could not pass laws interfering with slavery, denied that the Fugitive Slave Clause even applied to slaves, and believed that the Constitution was an engine for abolition. While Davis was on the SJC, the court issued advisory opinions on two of the most explosive issues in American politics: Black voting rights after Dred Scott v. Sandford and the Fugitive Slave Act. This Note explores the evolution of the law on slavery and race in the United States prior to the Civil War, focusing on Maine and the political pressures surrounding the SJC at that time. Next, this Note examines the SJC’s Voting Rights Opinion (1857) and the Personal Liberty Law Opinion (1861), focusing especially on Justice Davis’s novel constitutional arguments. Finally, drawing on these two cases, this Note argues that radical modes of antislavery constitutionalism were embedded in the American judiciary prior to the Civil War and evaluates the impact of this discovery on current debates in legal history.
--Dan Ernst
