LAWS-8515 (2) Seminar: Forced Labor

Reviews several regimes of compulsory labor that havebeen central to the American experience: Black chattel slavery in the antebellum South; debt peonage, criminal surety, and related institutions of agricultural involuntary servitude; convict leasing and other forms of compulsory inmate labor; "White slavery" and prostitution; and forced labor among immigrants. Emphasizes the complicated role that the law has played, and in some respects continues to play, in both supporting and undermining such institutions.