Slavery became illegal when the 13th Amendment was adopted in 1865, but Prigg has been most often cited in the decades thereafter, mostly in cases involving property law, as guidance regarding the boundaries between state and federal power, Simard said.
The Supreme Court made slavery's importance to the America's founding clear when it ruled that Pennsylvania's anti-slavery law was an unconstitutional affront to the federal Fugitive Slave Act, and ruled in favor of Edward Prigg, who had forced Margaret Morgan and her children into slavery in Maryland.
“Because people are invested in trying to pretend that our history of slavery didn’t happen and that its effects are not still with us,” Simard told The Associated Press, “I thought, what better way to prove that slavery had an influence on our legal system than using official legal sources?”.
“The unashamed use of human beings as property and as the foundation for the development of jurisprudence regarding property law is the same reason courts across this country rarely find violations of civil rights in employment and other contexts in its rulings and decisions,” Mungo said.
Most of the slavery precedents concern how property rights were protected by the U.S. Constitution, which was written by wealthy property owners in an era when much of the young nation’s economy was powered by the buying and selling and sweat of enslaved people.
