In the last few decades, the world woke up to the persistence of the traffic in human beings, a severe form of human exploitation. The use of “slavery” to designate the traffic, and other severe forms of contemporary exploitation, evokes and invokes the 400-year-long traffic of Africans across the Atlantic and their enslavement in the New World. The implicit and explicit comparisons to the enslavement of the ancestors of Diasporic Blacks are used to further a superficial understanding of contemporary forms of exploitation and limited efforts to prevent or eradicate them. However, the voices of Diasporic Blacks are often absent in the debates regarding the use of the word “slavery” and the comparisons of old and new slaveries. In this Article, I explore Black interests in slaveries past, present, and future, including uses of the word in the context of contemporary human trafficking discourse. The interests vary depending on the temporal period: the Past (understanding historic slavery); the Present (identifying and dealing with legacies of historic slavery); and the Future (disrupting the legacy).
This Article briefly considers the origins of the term social justice and its evolution beside our understandings of human rights and liberalism, which are two other significant justice categories. After this reflection on the contemporary meaning of social justice, I suggest that vulnerability theory, which seeks to replace the rational man of liberal legal thought with the vulnerable subject, should be used to define the contours of the term. Recognition of fundamental, universal, and perpetual human vulnerability reveals the fallacies inherent in the ideals of autonomy, independence, and individual responsibility that have supplanted an appreciation of the social. I suggest that we need to develop a robust language of state or collective responsibility, one that recognizes that social justice is realized through the legal creation and maintenance of just social institutions and relationships.
This short essay commemorates the law school at which I taught for sixteen years on the occasion of its closing. The essay celebrates a time at the law school when I was surrounded by committed teachers and scholars and our students were supported by a robust experiential learning program, including strong clinical programs.
