The History We Elide

At Harvard Law School in the 1950s, I noticed the case books on property and contract law did not include commercial cases over slave 'ownership.' In pre-Civil War generations, the courts were full of litigation--slave families were valuable 'property' whose exploitation led to contractual conflicts between slave 'owners.' Yet law students were not exposed to this brutal side of the so-called rule of law. A law professor told me that casebook publishers excluded these cases because they wanted to sell books in the South. I think there were other taboos at work, as [The 1619 Project] points out.

-- Ralph Nader, The New York Times Magazine (2019 Sep 8), pg. 6