Often disguised as "legal" migration or employment opportunities, human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery where individuals are coerced into servitude.
Illegal Aspects of Legal Slavery is a sobering, necessary read. It strips away the comfort of viewing slavery as simply a "legal norm of the past" and exposes it as a system defined by its own criminality, sanctioned by a broken legal system. Highly recommended for serious students of history and law. skacat illegal aspects of legal slavery 18 best
In the post-1830 US South, teaching a slave to read was criminalized (e.g., South Carolina 1834, Virginia 1831). However, this illegal act was often committed by sympathetic whites or slaves themselves. Whether it was “illegal” depended on the jurisdiction. In earlier periods or other colonies, literacy was not banned. So the illegal nature varied by time/place—but where banned, literacy instruction became an underground illegal activity within a legal slave system. Highly recommended for serious students of history and law
A helpful distinction made in this text is the difference between what was illegal by statute and what was "illegal" by natural law. It digs into the harsh reality that while slave codes provided some theoretical protections for the enslaved (such as prohibiting wanton killing), these were almost never enforced. The book exposes the complicity of the judicial system in creating a space where the "legal" protection of property trumped the "illegal" torture of human beings. Whether it was “illegal” depended on the jurisdiction
In nearly every historic slave-legal system, the killing of a slave by a (not the owner) was a crime. More surprisingly, in some jurisdictions, even an owner could face penalties for deliberately killing a slave without cause.