Legal Mobilization of Enslaved Litigants: Ecclesiastical versus Civil Lawsuits

该项目是对1600-1700年期间秘鲁利马被奴役男女提起的档案诉讼进行全面调查、索引编制和分析。要调查的法院文件是解放案件、家庭团聚上诉、所有权变更请愿书和自购诉讼。 目标有两个：第一种：第二：确定更有利于奴隶索赔的法律的论坛，以及使奴隶能够使用这些论坛的职业、居住地、性别和种姓情况。 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和作为财产的地位存在深刻的矛盾。比较奴隶制研究中的大部分争论可以归结为一个中心论点，即哪种法律的制度更有利于自由。大陆法系为奴隶解放创造了比普通法系传统的奴隶制更大的机会。 英属加勒比海和美国南部的奴隶几乎没有利用法律的制度来追求他们的自由，其速度与拉丁美洲奴隶相当。这项研究将提供有关奴隶诉讼结果的经验数据，这些数据可以为关于殖民地拉丁美洲被奴役诉讼当事人的法律的机构、奴隶法律的人格的模糊性以及法院作为奴隶主利益的保护者或诋毁者的作用的更大的理论辩论提供信息。 这些数据反过来将有助于人道主义和社会科学学者进行比较奴隶制研究，评估法院在拒绝或批准奴隶索赔方面的可衡量表现，并将加深我们对法院在社会变革时期的作用的理解。

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.