Legal Mobilization of Enslaved Litigants: Ecclesiastical versus Civil Lawsuits

本项目是对1600-1700年间秘鲁利马被奴役男女提起的诉讼档案进行全面调查、索引和分析。调查的法院文书包括：遗属诉讼、家庭团聚诉讼、所有权变更诉讼、自行购买诉讼等。目的有两个：第一：确定法律论据是成功的被奴役的诉讼当事人考虑到他们的奴役条件和他们微不足道的社会，经济和政治权力；第二：确定法律论坛更有利于奴隶索赔，以及职业，居住地，性别和种姓的情况，使奴隶能够使用这些论坛。核心假设是，奴隶诉讼当事人的诉求在教会法庭往往比在世俗法庭更成功，因为他们是在一个宗教和法律背景下被提起的，在这个背景下，奴隶作为人的地位与-à-vis他们作为财产的地位之间存在着深深的矛盾。比较奴隶制研究中的许多争论可以归结为一个中心论点，即哪种法律制度更有利于自由。大陆法系比英美法系传统的动产奴隶制创造了更多的解放机会。英属加勒比地区和美国南部的奴隶几乎没有像拉丁美洲的奴隶那样利用法律体系来追求自由。本研究将提供关于奴隶诉讼结果的经验数据，可以为有关殖民拉丁美洲被奴役诉讼人的法律机构，奴隶法律人格的模糊性以及法院作为奴隶主利益保护者或诋毁者的作用的更大的理论辩论提供信息。通过评估法院在拒绝或批准奴隶索赔方面的可衡量表现，这些数据反过来将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.