Sovereignty, Race, and Freedom in Constitutions, Citations, and Corpuses

Abstract

Tribal Constitutions, Citing Slavery, and Petitioning for Freedom are digital legal history projects focused on expressions of sovereignty within tribal constitutions, the remnants of slavery in modern law, and the underexamined role of habeas petitioners in challenging coercion and confinement in the long-nineteenth-century United States. Each project deploys legal databases differently, but with the shared goal of contributing key insights to legal historical scholarship and offering interfaces that appeal to a broad, public audience.

Keywords

• Database
• Unpublished Archival Records
• Tribal Constitutions
• Slavery
• Habeas Corpus