We are delighted to present a conversation concerning racial justice between Greg Ablavsky (Stanford), Sam Erman (USC), and K-Sue Park (Georgetown). Their conversation will discuss the promise and perils of writing U.S. legal histories that feature slavery, Native dispossession, empire, racism, and nativism as central, reinforcing dynamics.  Can these interrelated systems of racist subordination provide throughlines for new and better accounts of the centuries-long American experience?  For the history of American law and of the U.S. Constitution?  Was law central to this story and, if so, how?  To find out, log on!  

Greg Ablavsky's scholarship focuses on early American legal history, particularly on issues of sovereignty, territory, and property in the early American West.  Sam Erman is a legal historian of U.S. empire between the Civil War and World War II.  K-Sue Park examines the creation of the American real estate system and the historical connections between property law, immigration law, and American Indian law."