The Legal Understanding of Slavery

Jean Allain is Professor of Public International Law at Queen's University, Belfast. He is Extraordinary Professor, Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is founding Editor of the Irish Yearbook of International Law and the author of The Slavery Conventions (2008) and Slavery in International Law (2012).

Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery ; Introduction ; SECTION 1: HISTORICAL READINGS OF THE LAW OF SLAVERY ; 1. The Nature of Slavery ; 2. The Law of Slavery in European ius commune ; 3. Definition and Conceptions of Slave Ownership in Islamic Law ; 4. The Definition of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Thinking: Not the True Roman Slavery ; 5. From Consensus to Consensus: Slavery in International Law ; SECTION 2: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: BLURRED BOUNDARIES OF SLAVERY ; 6. Slavery in the United States: Persons or Property?, ; 7. To Indent Oneself: Ownership, Contracts, and Consent in Antebellum Illinois ; 8. Under Color of Law: Siliadin v. France and the Dynamics of Enslavement in Historical Perspective ; 9. The Rise, Persistence, and Slow Decline of Legal Slavery ; 10. The Abolition of Slavery in the United States: Historical Context and its Contemporary Application ; SECTION 3: THE 1926 DEFINITION IN CONTEXT ; 11. The Definition of Slavery into the Twenty-First Century ; 12. Seeking to Understand the Definition of Slavery ; 13. The Concept of Property and the Concept of Slavery ; 14. Defining Slavery in all its Forms: Historical Inquiry as Contemporary Instruction ; SECTION 4: CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY ; 15. Slavery in its Contemporary Manifestations ; 16. Contemporary International Legal Norms on Slavery: Problems of Judicial Interpretation and Application ; 17. Trafficking, Gender, and Slavery: Past and Present ; 18. Professor Kevin Bales' Response to Professor Orlando Patterson ; 19. Professor Patterson Rejoiner: A Response to Professor Kevin Bales ; APPENDICES ; 1926 Slavery Convention ; 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery