Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:51:12.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Law as Redemption: A Historical Comparison of the Ways Marginalized People Use Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

This essay reflects on how Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013), a study of second‐century Roman Egypt, contributes to the study of law and on how legal culture in ancient Egypt relates to law and legal cultures in other times and places. From the perspective of social history, this essay focuses on the connections between the victims of violence who seek redress in local courts in Egypt and more contemporary work on the legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana and the United States. This comparison reveals how law becomes a vehicle for the marginalized to repair and reconstruct their personhood.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen, Nissenbaum. 1976. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura F. 2009. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post‐Revolutionary South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Ely, Melvin Patrick. 2005. Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1970s Through the Civil War. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 1985. Pigs and Positivism. Wisconsin Law Review 1985(4):899935.Google Scholar
Kennington, Kelly Marie. 2009. River of Injustice: St. Louis's Freedom Suits and the Changing Nature of Legal Slavery in Antebellum America. PhD diss., Department of History, Duke University, Durham, NC.Google Scholar
Kopytoff, Igor, and Miers, Suzanne. 1977. African “Slavery” as an Institution of Marginality. In Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor, 381. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Lockridge, Kenneth A. 1985. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 16361736. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Penningroth, Dylan C. 2003. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth‐Century South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Penningroth, Dylan C. 2011. Beasts and Bloodlines: Legacies of Slavery in Colonial Ghana. Paper presented at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting, June 2–5, San Francisco, CA.Google Scholar
Welch, Kimberly M. 2012. People at Law: Subordinate Southerners, Popular Governance, and Local Legal Culture in Antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana. PhD diss., Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.Google Scholar