Dred Scott v. Sandford looms over American legal and political history as perhaps the most infamous Supreme Court case of all time. In Dred Scott, the Court struck down the Missouri Compromise, holding that enslaved persons were property under the Due Process Clause and that slaveholders had the absolute right to bring them into any federal territory in the nation.
Did you know that a case raising similar issues as Dred Scott was litigated in California five years before the Supreme Court decided that case? Professor Jason Gillmer provides a thoughtful and detailed account of the California case, In re Perkins, in his forthcoming article, “Litigating Slavery’s Reach: A Story of Race, Rights, and the Law During the California Gold Rush.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=353902. At issue was the California Fugitive Slave Act of 1852, which declared that enslaved persons brought to California while it was a federal territory remained enslaved even after California entered the Union as a free state. Shortly after the statute was enacted, a case arose testing the law’s constitutionality, pitting the freedom of three enslaved men against the alleged Due Process rights of their enslaver. In this Touro Law Review podcast with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, Professor Gillmer explores the story that gave rise to the case, how he researched it, its relation to Dred Scott, and why the story is important to today.
Find Professor Gillmer’s book at https://ugapress.org/book/9780820351636/slavery-and-freedom-in-texas/.
Brought to you by the Touro Law Review.
Our guest today is Professor Jason Gillmer.
Professor Jason Gillmer
Jason Gillmer is the John J. Hemmingson Professor of Civil Liberties at Gonzaga University School of Law. He is a legal historian with a particular interest in the antebellum South, the conquest of the American West, and the Civil Rights era. His book, Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821-1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), was a finalist in the 2017 Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters. He also is the author of multiple law review articles, essays and book chapters, and he has published in such places as the Southern California Law Review, the Alabama Law Review, and the North Carolina Law Review.
Prior to teaching, Professor Gillmer clerked on the United States District Court of Minnesota and on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He also worked as an associate in the firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller, and Ciresi, where he helped represent the State of Minnesota in its landmark suit against the tobacco industry to recover the health costs associated with treating smoking-related illnesses.
Professor Gillmer has an LL.M from Harvard Law School, a J.D. from American University Washington School of Law, and a B.A in history from Carleton College.
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