MSU Law Professor, 3 Student Co-authors Published in Journal of Digital Legal History

Professor Simard MSU Law Assistant Professor and Director of Citing Slavery Project Justin Simard and three former MSU Law students who worked on the project jointly authored an article published in the 2023 issue of the Journal of Digital Legal History. Professor Simard and MSU graduates Audrea Dakho, Morgan Henry, and Ilina Krishen detailed the significance of the Citing Slavery Project’s mission to uncover “the past and continued influence of the law of American slavery,” and to “supplement the commercial legal databases that currently serve as essential gatekeepers of legal information and obscure slavery’s influence on the law.”

Prof. Simard and the students published the article alongside articles from the Petitioning for Freedom Project at the University of Nebraska and the Tribal Constitutions Project at Northwestern University. The teams worked together to showcase their projects, which have “the shared goal of contributing key insights to legal historical scholarship and offering interfaces that appeal to a broad, public audience.”

The Citing Slavery Project article highlighted the work that Simard’s team of student editors have accomplished to collect more than 11,000 slave cases from across the country and nearly 5,000 have been uploaded to the project’s website. This work, they note, “contributes to the Citing Slavery Project’s mission to recast traditional legal material in ways that challenge the conventional thinking of lawyers and legal scholars,” and “the legal system’s complicity in slavery.”

About the Authors

Professor Simard is deeply committed to this project which he launched in 2020 and his passion has attracted numerous law students to help advance this initiative as editors and researchers. Audrea Dakho (’23) started on the Citing Slavery Project as Research Assistant and later Editor. She is now a Legal Fellow with The Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans. Morgan Henry (’23) was Project Editor on the Project and is focusing now on Alternative Dispute Resolution and legal and historical research. Ilina Krishen (’23) worked as a Research Assistant on the project. She is now a Staff Attorney for Farmworker Legal Services in Ypsilanti.

“It was an incredible experience to co-author with these three terrific students,” said Professor Simard. “All three of them are excellent advocates for the work they’ve done and equally as passionate about the project.”