Lyle Cherneff, a 2024 Yale Law graduate, has published Remembering In re Turner: Popular Constitutionalism in the Reconstruction Era, in the Yale Law Journal:
This Note presents a historical account of the underexamined movement to end racialized apprenticeship laws in the post-slavery era. Original archival research from census records, Union Army files, and newspaper articles illustrate the contributions of formerly enslaved men, women, and children to the ultimately successful movement to declare Maryland's apprenticeship laws unconstitutional. Relying on the insights of Critical Race Theory and feminist legal theory, this Note fills a gap in existing legal history by producing a consideration of Reconstruction Era constitutional lawmaking "from the bottom." This Note argues that our shared constitutional memory has been artificially narrowed by an underconsideration of freedpeople's constitutional theories and claims. Restoring the anti-apprenticeship movement to our constitutional memory strengthens contemporary efforts to end racial discrimination in the child welfare system and to vindicate familial rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
--Dan Ernst
