Co-taught with Professor Walter Johnson

Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: No Exam

The modern American prison abolition movement consciously evokes the nineteenth century movement to abolish slavery. The institutions each movement sought to end—chattel slavery and the contemporary carceral state—are also directly linked, by intersecting lineages and genealogies, and by the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime” and thus preserved the legality of American slavery to this day, within prisons.

This course, offered jointly between Harvard Law School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, examines these linkages between institutions of coercive state power and between the movements that oppose them and seek to build different social systems, norms, and structures in their wake. We will focus on three moments in the history of abolitionism in the United States: the debate over slavery, Reconstruction, and the recent re-emergence of abolition as rubric for criticism of mass incarceration as well as inequality more generally. Our approach will be both historical – considering ideas in the context from which they emerged – and philosophical – considering the ethical implications and imaginable consequences – of various positions proposed in the debates we consider. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to the legal aspect of the proposals under consideration, including to the attention of the nature of law and lawyering themselves as effective vehicles of abolition. Along the way, we will consider the thought of William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, Emma Goldman, Rudolph Rocker, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Mariam Kaba, Tommie Shelby, Derecka Purnell, and others.

The class will meet once a week. Students will be expected to do two or three in-class presentations over the course of the semester, as well to contribute to the pre-class discussion board on Canvas. The major written work will consist of a final paper treating some aspect of the history or philosophy of abolition.

Note: This offering is cross-listed with FAS as AFRAMER 179X.