’A Southern College Slipped from its Geographical Moorings’: Slavery at Princeton
The Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory welcomes Professor Lolita Buckner Inniss, Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, Texas.
Kindly note that this conference takes place during a plenary of the Property Law course. RSVP lldrl.law [at] mcgill.ca by November 9.
Abstract
While slave-owning students at Princeton, a college in the northern U.S. state of New Jersey, rarely constituted a majority of students, they were often a large plurality of the students in the period before the U.S. Civil War. Because of Princeton’s historic role in educating southerners, it has sometimes been referred to as the most southern of the Ivy League schools. So many students from the U.S. South enrolled at Princeton during the first several decades of the college that one observer wrote that one might take Princeton for a “Southern college slipped from its geographical moorings.”
This talk challenges the idea of “the North” as a place of black freedom in the antebellum years by discussing the extent to which and whether Princeton behaved like a southern institution in its speech and actions concerning slavery and emancipation.
The speaker
Lolita Buckner Inniss is a Professor of Law and a Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas. Her research addresses geographic, historic and visual norms of law, especially in the context of comparative constitutionalism, gender and race.
Her current major research project is a book manuscript titled The Princeton Fugitive Slave: James Collins Johnson, an account of race, gender, slavery and the law at Princeton University.
She is the author of dozens of articles, essays and other writings, including her recent contribution to International Law's Objects (Oxford University Press), a volume addressing the legal and metaphoric aspects of various objects in international law.
Dr. Inniss received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her J.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. She also holds an LL.M. with Distinction and a Ph.D. in Law from Osgoode Hall, York University.
