H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History, gives the annual Robert R. Wilson Lecture titled, "Civil Rights as Human Rights." A member of the faculty of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Professor Lovelace is an expert in legal history, civil rights, human rights, and constitutional law. Before joining the Indiana Law faculty, he served as the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Race and Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Lovelace earned his J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Thavolia Glymph, the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History and a professor in the departments of History and African & African American Studies at Duke University gives the annual Robert R. Wilson Lecture titled, "'You will please let me know if we are free:' The Dissolution of Property Rights in Human Beings in War and the Bounds of Freedom."

Rebecca J. Scott, the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History, delivered Duke University's 2017 Robert R. Wilson Lecture. Prof. Scott's lecture, "Adjudicating Status in a Time of Slavery: Luisa Coleta and the Capuchin Friar (Havana, 1817)," asks to what extent the exercise of authority under slavery was constrained by law. Was the Caribbean war refugee named Coleta a slave, or was she a free woman?

During the Civil War the U.S. confronted a growing population of refugees and a humanitarian crisis. The refugees of the Civil War were predominantly slaves - and increasingly women and children - who fled slavery hoping to get to Union military lines in the South. By the end of the Civil War, tens of thousands had passed through, and many died in, refugee camps. In today's language, they constituted an internally displaced population and simultaneously, a stateless people.

"What, precisely, is the legal evil of slavery?" Adrienne Davis, the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History examines this question and other aspects of slavery's intersection with law when she delivers Duke University's annual Robert R. Wilson Lecture. Professor Davis is visiting Duke Law during the fall 2013 semester from Washington University in St. Louis, where she is Vice Provost and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law.

Did Lincoln deserve his reputation as the Great Emancipator? Did he free the slaves? Why did he wait so long? What were the consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation? These and other questions will be explored by Paul Finkelman, John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of Legal History, during the Robert R. Wilson Lecture entitled "How a Railroad Lawyer Became the Great Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln, and the Problem of Ending Slavery."

On Monday, April 11, at 5 p.m., Evelyn Higginbotham, our inaugural John Hope Franklin Professor of Law and History, will present a special lecture entitled "A Summons to History: The African American Historical Perspective in the Legal Battle for Racial Equality."

November 28, 2011 - Mary Dudziak, the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History, delivers a public lecture on "The Martial Spirit" in American History: John Hope Franklin on Militarization and War.