Robert B. Pasker, City University of New York, has posted "Which History has Condescended to Notice": Black Testimony in Antebellum Courts:
This study investigates the contested admissibility of Black testimony in American courts between 1790 and 1865, analyzing 73 appellate opinions across 11 states and the District of Columbia. Contrary to the prevailing historiography that portrays antebellum statutes as universally excluding Black voices, these cases reveal that judges frequently exercised discretion to admit testimony where exclusion threatened the courts’ procedural capacity to adjudicate. The analysis demonstrates that judicial reasoning prioritized institutional functionality rather than moral or rights-based considerations.
A central challenge was methodological: appellate case law is vast, dispersed, and embedded in archaic legal language that resists conventional search tools. To overcome this, I developed Roscoe, a machine-learning system designed to perform conceptual searches, generate topical classifications, and produce plain-language summaries of nineteenth-century case law. Named for Roscoe Pound, the system allowed efficient retrieval and categorization of relevant cases from hundreds of thousands of digitized opinions. Roscoe not only enhanced recall and precision in identifying Black testimony cases but also facilitated thematic grouping across jurisdictional boundaries, making possible a genuinely national analysis.
The findings expose the structural contradiction at the core of antebellum jurisprudence: statutes that categorically barred Black testimony collided with the judiciary’s pragmatic need for probative evidence. Appellate decisions show how Black participation forced courts to adapt in ways that preserved institutional authority while reinforcing racial hierarchy. This duality—judicial flexibility without recognition of Black rights—complicates prevailing narratives of antebellum legal history and demonstrates how digital methodologies can expand the evidentiary base of legal historiography.
I'm trying to decide whether Roscoe Pound would appreciate the hommage.
--Dan Ernst
