The Texas Law Review (Volume 103, issue 9) recently published an essay of interest: Kali Murray (Marquette University Law School), "Seeing the Dead: Marks, Meaning and the Haunting of American Trademark Law." The essay draws on history to discuss "trademark’s fraught relationship with social identities of race and caste in the United States." An excerpt from the Introduction (footnotes omitted):
Slave labor was central to the making of the modern world. It gave Europeans the means to occupy and develop the Americas. The trade in slaves helped merchants accumulate capital that was reinvested in agriculture, industry, and infrastructure. Slave plantations produced the sugar, cotton, and coffee that propelled the industrial revolution in the North Atlantic countries.
Trademark law is an ideal place to consider the relationship of intellectual property to the political, social, and economic system of enslavement. Trademarks, which protect the commercial signs associated with the goods and services of its users, seem to be intimately connected to the economic practices of enslavement, either because a slave market would advertise its services in selling enslaved individuals using trade names or because goods like sugar or cotton produced by enslaved persons would be trademarked.
I use fugitive slave advertisements—advertisements placed in colonial and antebellum newspapers that sought the return of an enslaved person to their enslaver—to explore the relationship of trademark law and the construction of race and caste in the United States. . . .
Read on here.
-- Karen Tani
