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105 Harv. L. Rev. 1359 (1991-1992)
Child Abuse As Slavery: A Thirteenth Amendment Response to DeShaney

handle is hein.journals/hlr105 and id is 1379 raw text is: COMMENTARY CHILD ABUSE AS SLAVERY: A THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT RESPONSE TO DESHANEY Akdzil Reed Amar* and Daniel Widawsky Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. U.S. CONSTITUTION' The Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution is a grand yet simple declaration of the personal freedom of all the human race within the jurisdiction of this government.'2 In a single stroke, the Amendment outlawed the peculiar institution of southern chattel slavery - auction blocks, overseers, iron chains, and all. Yet the Amendment is more than a mere nineteenth-century relic, written only to reform a peculiar time and place. Its framers' disgust with the peculiar institution led them to announce a more universal, transcendent norm: slavery, of all forms and in all places, shall not exist. Emancipation did not discriminate by age; the Amendment freed minors as well as adults. Nor did the Amendment discriminate on the basis of familial status; many slaves in 1865 were mulattoes fathered by white slavemasters, yet they were also plainly protected. The Amendment embraced not only those slaves with some African ancestry, but all persons, whatever their race or national origin. Its sweeping words and vision prohibited not only forced labor for the master's economic enrichment, but all forms of chattel slavery - whether the ultimate motive for such domination, degradation, and dehumanization was greed (as in the cotton market) or sadism (as at the end of a lash). Finally, the Amendment compelled abolition of even private enslavement perpetuated not by the force of law, but * Professor of Law, Yale University. -* B.A. 1987, University of California at Berkeley; J.D. i991, Yale University. We are especially grateful for the suggestions we received on earlier drafts of this Commentary from Vik Amar, Ian Ayers, Mike Barr, Evan Caminker, David Brion Davis, Paul Gewirtz, Joe Goldstein, Andy Koppelman, Sandy Levinson, Mike McConnell, Martha Minow, Vinita Par- kash, Jed Rubenfeld, David Strauss, Cass Sunstein, and Ron Wright. I U.S. CONST. amend. XIII, § i. 2 The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 69 (1873). '359

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