Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname

This article, which was the title of Natalie Davis' Edwards Lecture at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, has now been published by the Law and Society Review. It is part of a special issue on Law Slavery and Justice. (Volume 29, issue 4, 2011).

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emerita from Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Toronto <nz.davis@utoronto.ca>. Among her many publications are The Return of Martin
Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983), Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 1987), The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Vintage Canada and Harvard University Press, 2000), and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (Hill and Wang, 2006). This article was originally presented in a shorter version as the 2010 John Ll. J. Edwards Lecture for the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, and she is grateful to colleagues there for their discussion. She thanks Sara Beam, William A. Christian, Jr., Colin Dayan, Malick Ghachem, Linda Heywood, Martin Klein, Paul Lovejoy, Melanie Newton, Rebecca J. Scott, and John K. Thornton for their valuable advice, although none of them is responsible for any errors in this essay. Her research assistant, Kate Creasey, was of great help in tracking
down sources in the history of Dutch law.

You can read the complete article here.