Over at the legal history blog Sally Greene--whom I frequently describe as our nation's most thoughtful politician--has a series of posts on Thomas Ruffin's 1830 opinion in State v. Mann. The posts explore the new evidence about the characters involved in the lawsuit, as well as questions about how to "do" legal history and what questions we might ask of it.
Mann was an incredibly controversial case at the time--abolitionists employed it because it spoke honestly about brutalization that lay at the heart of slavery. And ... and here's something that no one's spoken about recently: it illustrates a conflict between the cold legal logic of law (at least as Ruffin phrased it) and a sympathetic approach to law (as Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote). And you know what? President Obama
taught State v. Mann to his students at the University of Chicago.
So we have a decision issued nearly 180 years ago, which is still generating new insight ... and perhaps inspiring or at least feeding the current debate over law vs. sympathy!
The image is a picture of Thomas Ruffin's tombstone in Hillsborough, NC.
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