Slavery, Abolition, and Human Rights: A Symposium on the Thirteenth Amendment

The University of Chicago Law School and the Loyola University (Chicago) School of Law will host a symposium on April 17 and 18 at the University of Chicago Law School auditorium titled Slavery, Abolition, and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Thirteenth Amendment.

Alex Tsesis (Loyola) and Amy Dru Stanley (U. Chicago History), the organizers, have put together a very impressive program.  Here's the description:

The conference explores the past and present significance of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery andprovided constitutional authority for eradicating its badges and incidents and, ultimately, to pass wide ranging civil rights laws.  The amendment has offered powerful protections for individual rights and equal treatment against wrongs ranging from peonage and housing discrimination to school segregation and trafficking in persons.  Yet the amendment's enduring emancipatory significance has been little studied.  The conference looks anew at the foundations and reach of the Thirteenth Amendment, bringing together scholars in the fields of history, law, philosophy, political science, and literature for robust inquiry into its antislavery career.

Papers from the conference will be published in The Promises of Liberty: Thirteenth Amendment Abolitionism and its Contemporary Vitality (Alex Tsesis, ed., Columbia U. Press 2010).

Check this out; it promises to be an interesting and important event.

  "Scene in the House on the Passage of the Proposition to Amend the Constitution, January 31, 1865," Harper's Weekly, February 18, 1865.

 

SDS