Slavery as Contract:Betty's Caseand the Question of Freedom

This article offers a theoretical reading of the 1857 freedom suit, Betty's Case, wherein a slave woman, Betty, declared free by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, returned to Tennessee with her owners. Based on the case's enduring question of whether the freedom to contract should include the freedom to be a slave, the article argues that this question is foundational for the ever-present jurisprudential problem of negotiating the empirical development of the idea of free will with the transcendental right of freedom in modern contract law. This deeper understanding of slavery as contract deconstructs and builds on critical legal studies of slavery that have largely focused on the legal constitution of the slave as property.