Legal Mobilization of Enslaved Litigants: Ecclesiastical versus Civil Lawsuits

该项目对1600年至1700年期间在秘鲁利马被奴役的男女提起的诉讼进行了全面的调查、索引和分析。调查的法院文书有过失案件、家庭团聚诉状、所有权变更诉状和自购诉讼。目标有两个：第一，鉴于被奴役的当事人的奴役状况以及他们微不足道的社会、经济和政治权力，确定对他们有利的法律论据；第二，确定更有利于奴隶主张的法律论坛，以及使奴隶能够使用这些论坛的占领、居住、性别和种姓的情况。核心假设是，奴隶诉讼当事人的主张在教会法庭上往往比在世俗法庭上更成功，因为他们是在宗教和法律的背景下提出的，这种背景对奴隶作为人的地位与作为财产的地位有着深刻的矛盾。比较奴隶制研究中的许多争论都可以归结为一个核心论点，即哪种法律制度更有利于自由。与普通法传统的动产奴隶制相比，大陆法系为过失创造了更多的机会。英属加勒比海和美国南部的奴隶几乎没有使用法律制度来追求他们的自由，其速度与拉丁美洲的奴隶相当。这项研究将提供关于奴隶诉讼结果的经验数据，这些数据可以为更大的理论辩论提供参考，这些辩论涉及殖民拉丁美洲被奴役诉讼当事人的法律机构、奴隶法律人格的模棱两可，以及法院作为奴隶主利益的保护者或诋毁者的角色。这些数据反过来将通过评估法院在拒绝或批准奴隶制主张方面的可衡量表现，帮助人文主义和社会科学学者进行比较奴隶制研究，并将加深我们对法院在社会变革时期的作用的更广泛的理解。

This project is a comprehensive survey, indexing and analysis of archived lawsuits brought by enslaved men and women in Lima, Peru between 1600-1700. The court documents to be surveyed are manumission cases, appeals for family unification, change of ownership petitions, and self-purchase lawsuits. The objective is twofold: first: to identify legal arguments that were successful for enslaved litigants given their condition of bondage and their negligible social, economic and political power, and second: to identify legal forums which were more favorable to slave claims, and the circumstances of occupation, residence, gender, and caste that enabled slaves to use these forums. The central hypothesis is that slave litigants' claims were often more successful in ecclesiastical courts than they were in secular courts, because they were brought within a religious and legal context that was deeply ambivalent about the status of slaves as humans vis-à-vis their status as property. Much of the debate in comparative slavery studies can be reduced to a central argument about which legal system was more favorable to liberty. Civil law systems created greater opportunities for manumission than the common law tradition of chattel slavery. Slaves in the British Caribbean and the US South hardly used the legal system to pursue their freedom at comparable rates to Latin American slaves. This research will provide empirical data about outcomes of slave litigation that can inform larger theoretical debates about the legal agency of colonial Latin American enslaved litigants, the ambiguity of slaves' legal personality, and the role of courts as protectors or detractors of slaveholders' interests. This data in turn will assist humanist and social science scholars in comparative slavery studies, by assessing the measurable performance of courts in denying or approving slave claims, and will deepen our understanding of the role of courts in times of social change more generally.