Our Digital Legal Research Lab is an interdisciplinary hub for the social scientific study of freedom making in the United States over the long nineteenth century. Our team explores legal mobilization among marginalized actors who leveraged the law to challenge enslavement, deportation, coercive confinement, coverture, and institutionalization. Building an interactive and relational database of petitions for freedom, our lab is committed to training undergraduates in critical legal inquiry, archival research methods, data collection and processing, and in transcription and encoding techniques that allow us to demonstrate patterns and strategies in legal mobilization and legal decision making. Vital to legal scholars and practitioners interested in concepts of justice, liberty, and due process, the database features thousands of freedom stories that are central to the American legal tradition.
2023
Habeas at Home and Heart: Progressive Era Cases of Spousal Confinement to Nebraska's Psychiatric Households, Isabelle Childs
"The Best Interests of the Child:" Parental Claims in Nebraska Child Custody Cases, 1877 1924, Esme Krohn
One Among Many: Charlotte Kolmitz,Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle, 1918 -1925, Anna Synya
2022
Legal Strategies Used by Black Men During the Antebellum Period, A. D. Banse
Habeas Corpus: Breaking Reservation Boundaries, Samantha Byrd
Habeas Corpus as a Means for Economic Freedom in the Progressive Era, Janana Khattak
A Home Shielded by Laws: Freedom Suits and Enslaved Mothers, Heidi Martin
In the Waiting: The Role of the Slave Bastille in Antebellum D.C., Ellyzabeth Morales-Ledesma