Northern and free state appellate courts decided 287 published cases involving enslaved people between 1784 and 1875. The dataset includes case details such as the names of enslaved individuals, legal subject matter, and citation counts. It was compiled by the Citing Slavery Project to reveal the legal system's involvement with slavery.
Use Cases
- Analyze the frequency of specific legal subject matter categories across the 287 cases to identify predominant legal disputes.
- Examine citation counts to assess the historical influence and legal precedent set by these slavery-related decisions.
- Map the geographic distribution of cases by court location to understand regional judicial engagement with slavery.
- Study the named enslaved individuals to trace their appearances across multiple legal proceedings or jurisdictions.
Strengths
- Contains 287 specific, published legal cases, providing a concrete historical sample.
- Covers a significant 91-year time range from 1784 to 1875, spanning key historical periods.
- Includes analytically rich features such as named enslaved individuals, legal subject matter, and citation counts.
Limitations
- The sample size of 287 cases may be limited for certain statistical analyses or broad generalizations.
- Focus is exclusively on northern and free state appellate courts, excluding southern states and lower courts, creating a geographic bias.
- Data is historical and static, ending in 1875, with no ongoing updates.
Provenance
- Source
- Citing Slavery Project
- Collection Method
- Compilation of published legal case records.
- Time Range
- 1784 to 1875
- Freshness
- null
- Geography
- Northern and free states of the United States