At its annual meeting last month, the American Society for Legal History awarded its Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize to Justin Simard for his Citing Slavery Project. Here is the citation.
--Dan ErnstThe Citing Slavery Project, created by Justin Simard, Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan State University, and his team is a curated database of published civil case decisions from the nineteenth century involving slavery—either with enslaved people as parties or participants in the litigation or slave property as the subject of the suit. By documenting the past and continued influence of the American law of slavery via contemporary citations to slavery cases, it forces the legal profession to confront its role in American slavery. In 2021, the Bluebook added a rule in response to the project to encourage the use of a parenthetical such as (slavery case) or (enslaved party) in citations to slave cases. Seventy works of scholarship have already implemented this rule. The Citing Slavery Project achieved two major milestones during the award year. First, Professor Simard and his team completed the initial compilation of 9,000 slave cases from 42 states and territories. Second, they linked their database to Harvard’s open source Caselaw Access Project. The link is especially significant because it facilitates the project’s analytical arm (tracking primary and secondary citations to slave cases) and its publicity arm (allowing everyday users direct access to the text and original scans of the slavery opinions). The committee applauds Dr. Simard and his team for the scholarly importance and intellectual generosity of this enlightening digital legal history project.
Justin Simaud
