Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Law Britta Redwood, who was accepted to the 2025 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, which will be held this summer. 

Her paper, "A Brutal Anomaly: Unfettered Ownership Rights and the Illegality of Transatlantic Chattel Slavery," was chosen through a double-blind selection process by scholars at all three schools. Only 12-20 junior scholars are chosen to present their work. The forum aims to foster and promote academic dialogue about the selected papers, as well as broader legal issues, and strengthen ties between junior and senior professors. 

The areas of law that the forum covers change each year. In one year, scholars may discuss public law and humanities subjects, while private law and dispute resolution will be covered in the next. 

This year’s forum will cover several areas of public law, including international law, which is what Redwood’s paper focuses on. 

The paper examines the status of transatlantic chattel slavery in international law prior to the nineteenth century. The status of transatlantic chattel slavery at the time it was practiced is central to demands advanced by the global movement for reparations.   

“The paper challenges prevailing arguments that transatlantic chattel slavery was not unlawful prior to the nineteenth century,” said Redwood. “It argues that treaty law and customary international law, on which prevailing arguments usually rely, are unreliable and ultimately Eurocentric modes of analysis. Instead, the paper argues that the legal status of transatlantic chattel slavery must be considered under the general principles of international law. Using this method of analysis, it concludes that the slaveholding practices in British and French New World colonies were unlawful at the time. Slaveholding in these contexts was characterized by modern, maximalist ownership rights, which enslavers claimed over the enslaved. These maximalist ownership rights were contrary to the legal norms governing slavery in the rest of the world at the time.” 

The forum will be held on June 2-3, 2025, at Harvard Law School.