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84 B.U. L. Rev. 1375 (2004)
Corrective Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Legacy of Slavery and Jim Crow

handle is hein.journals/bulr84 and id is 1387 raw text is: CORRECTIVE JUSTICE, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY AND JIM CROW DAVID LYONS* IN TROD U CTION ............................................................................................. 1375 I. COMPENSATION, RESTITUTION, AND CORRECTIVE JUSTICE ............. 1378 A . The M oral D ebt M odel .............................................................. 1379 B. The Material Disadvantage Model ............................................ 1381 C. The Unjust Enrichment M odel ................................................... 1382 D . The Institution M odel ................................................................ 1384 II. THE ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ...................................... 1385 A . The Eighteenth Century ............................................................. 1386 B. The N ineteenth Century ............................................................. 1388 C. The Twentieth Century .............................................................. 1389 III. W HAT IS TO BE DONE? ..................................................................... 1397 A. The M aterial Component ........................................................... 1400 B. The M oral Component ............................................................... 1402 INTRODUCTION1 Chattel slavery was a brutally cruel, repressive, and exploitative system of racial subjugation.2 When it was abolished, the former slaveholders owed the freedmen compensation for the terrible wrongs of enslavement.3 Ex-slaves sought reparations, especially in the form of land, but few received any sort of recompense.4 The wrongs they suffered were never repaired. * Professor of Law, Law Alumni Scholar, and Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. I This paper is a sequel to David Lyons, Unfinished Business: Racial Junctures in U.S. History and Their Legacy, in JUSTICE IN TIME: RESPONDING TO HISTORICAL INJUSTICE 271 (Lukas H. Meyer ed., 2004) [hereinafter Unfinished Business]. It develops ideas that were sketched briefly in the last section of that paper, id. at 294-97, as well as in David Lyons, Reparations and Equal Opportunity, 24 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 177, 184-85 (2004) [hereinafter Reparations and Equal Opportunity]. I am grateful for comments on earlier versions of the current paper by many persons at Boston University, UCLA, and Boston College and for research assistance by Kathleen O'Malley and John B. Koss. 2 See Reparations and Equal Opportunity, supra note 1, at 181 (describing the development of chattel slavery into a racist system that did not apply to white servants). 3Id. 4 ERIC FONER, RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION 1863-1877, at 51- 54, 70-71 (1988) (recounting the government's broken promise to provide black families with forty acres of land and assist[ance] . . . with the loan of mules). 1375

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