Dartmouth Events

Prior to the Civil War, antislavery activists debated whether to join politics or shun the political realm as tainted by slavery.  My talk will focus on one group of those activists – antislavery constitutionalists. Antislavery constitutionalists claimed that slavery violated protections for individual rights in the original Constitution. They invoked the constitution to support their political argument against slavery. Fugitive slaves and free blacks reinforced their movement by asserting their own right to freedom and individual rights. All of these activists contributed to the eventual abolition of slavery and were important players in constitutional development outside of the courts. Eventually, members of the Reconstruction Congress enshrined their theories of rights into the Constitution

Speaker Bio:

Rebecca E. Zietlow is Charles W. Fornoff Professor of Law and Values at the University of Toledo College of Law, where she teaches Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure and Constitutional Litigation. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, and her J.D. from Yale Law School.  In 2012, she received the University of Toledo Outstanding Faculty Research Award.

Professor Zietlow’s scholarly interest is in the study of the Reconstruction Era, including the meaning and history of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.  Professor Zietlow is also an expert on constitutional theory, examining constitutional interpretation outside of the courts.   Her most recent book, The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Her first book, Enforcing Equality: Congress, the Constitution and the Protection of Individual Rights (NYU Press 2006), studies the history of congressional protection of rights, and the implications of that history for constitutional theory.  Her work has been published in the Columbia Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Florida Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Journal, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, amongst other publications.

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