Nanette Wenger, MD, MACC, MACP, FAHA, Professor Emerita of Medicine

Robert Schapiro, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

a new series that is being initiated around Psychiatry and the Humanities.  Jericho Brown is the first presenter in the series on Nov. 12 in the evening at the Emory Brain Health Center- 12 Executive Park Drive.  For more information, please contact Phyllis:

Phyllis Rosen LCSW

Philanthropy and Community Relationships

Senior Associate

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Emory University School of Medicine

12 Executive Park NE- Suite 250

Atlanta, GA 30329

prosen@emory.edu

Robert Schapiro, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

For most of his thirty years on the United States Supreme Court, and especially after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, Justice Anthony Kennedy stood at the center of a divided court.  Though he generally sided with his more conservative colleagues on a range of important issues, from the death penalty to abortion to affirmative action, Justice Kennedy moderated the conservative trajectory of the Court.  His replacement by Justice Brett Kavanaugh opens a new chapter in the history of the Court.  The 2018-2019 Term of the Court gave some indication of the Court's new direction, with Justice Kavanaugh offering some surprising and unsurprising votes.  The Supreme Court Term beginning in October 2019 promises to be more revealing and more controversial, as the Justices grapple with topics including immigration, LGBT rights, and gun control, and they may well return once again to abortion and the Affordable Care Act. In this Colloquium, Robert will review some of the key decisions from last year, preview some of the significant cases of this Term, and discuss the larger themes of the Court's evolving jurisprudence.

About Robert Schapiro

Robert Schapiro is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University and co-director of Emory Law's Center on Federalism and Intersystemic Governance. He served as dean of Emory University School of Law (2012 to 2017) and interim dean (2011 to 2012). He was previously associate vice provost for academic affairs for Emory University. He served as Emory Law's associate dean of faculty (2006 to 2008) and as associate faculty director for Emory's Halle Institute for Global Learning (2008 to 2010).

Schapiro received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009, the Ben F. Johnson Faculty Excellence Award in 2004, the Most Outstanding Professor Award (as voted on by Emory Law's graduating class) for the 2000-2001 academic year, and the Professor of the Year Award from the Black Law Students Association in 2001.  Currently, he teaches courses on federal courts, constitutional law, and civil procedure. 

Professor Schapiro taught for two years at Duke Law School before coming to Emory.  Prior to that, he served as a clerk for Judge Pierre N. Leval, then of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the US Supreme Court. He worked with the law firm of Sidley & Austin in Washington, DC, where he practiced general and appellate litigation.

Schapiro received a BA from Yale University in 1984, an MA from Stanford University in 1986, and a JD from Yale Law School in 1990.

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My Heilbrun Fellowship will fund the expansion and preparation for digital publication of "Freedom Papers: A Database of Cartas de Alforria, Salvador, Bahia, 1820-1850," the most comprehensive database of cartas de alforria (freedom papers) of slaves in the province of Bahia, Brazil, during the nineteenth century, and one of the most comprehensive for Brazil as a whole in any period. Forty-four percent of all Africans sold into the transatlantic slave trade during its 350-year history were transported to Brazil - 15% to Bahia and 19% in the nineteenth century. The database contributes significantly to the study of slavery in Brazil by helping historians better understand the paths that enslaved women and men forged to freedom during the institution's expansive last century. It illuminates, moreover, the restricted meaning of that freedom by documenting the conditions placed on the slaves' manumission at the moment it was granted.

The database is being created, however, not primarily to study manumission but to advance research on the biographies of the individual men, women, and children enslaved in Africa and transported to the Americas, as well as on the lives of their descendants. This work, once regarded as impossible except in rare cases, is now on the cutting edge of the study of the slave trade and slavery. It has been inspired by the transformative Voyages: Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which was created at Emory University under the distinguished leadership of Woodruff Professor Emeritus David Eltis. Voyages took the individual slaving vessel as the unit of study. Scholars around the world are now pushing beyond the slaving voyage to investigate the lives of individual enslaved Africans. "Freedom Papers" is a product of such research conducted while writing a book Transatlantic Lives: Slavery and Freedom in West Africa and Brazil. The work narrates the remarkable stories of two groups of Yoruba-speakers who were enslaved between 1820 and 1850 during the protracted civil wars that followed the collapse of the great Oyo Empire. Some of these men, women, and children became slaves in West Africa; others were sold to Bahia. Thanks to their own resilience and the dense networks of transatlantic exchange, travel, and communication at the heart of the huge nineteenth century Afro-Bahian slave trade, enslavement did not permanently rupture relations among the Africans at the heart of my study. They all, in time, resourcefully freed themselves and reunited in the town of Lagos on the West African coast, where they reconstructed family, ethnic, and religious bonds.

Transatlantic Lives pioneers a new approach to the recovery of transatlantic slave biographies. It yields powerful new insights into how the many thousands of Yoruba-speakers enslaved in the nineteenth century endured that profoundly alienating and de-humanizing experience.  Moreover, it presents a new interpretation of the origins and transformation of the now globally important Yoruba diaspora.

After six field seasons of excavations at Tell Halif (Israel), my staff and I accumulated a large amount of material culture that needs to be prepared for final publication.  Our site, located about 12 miles northeast of Beersheba, is a mound containing over 23 different layers of occupation going back to the third millennium BCE (Before the Common Era) and up to modern times.  Our work concentrated on a layer that contains the remains of a fortified town from the 8^th century BCE, which was destroyed by an Assyrian military campaign that is well documented in the Bible and in extra-biblical sources.  The campaign, which took place in 701 BCE, was led by the Assyrian King Sennacherib in reaction to a revolt headed by the Judean King Hezekiah.

Besides pottery, the remains recovered by our archaeological excavations contain many data that need to be analyzed, including organic remains (seeds, wood), animal bones (domestic and wild), land snails and marine shells, lithic and metal implements, and more, all of which relate to daily life in this town.  Analyses of these finds help identify economic and cultural relationships between the town's inhabitants and surrounding regions.  Some samples help determine what type of climate was prevalent during the period of the town's destruction.

In addition to the remains from the 8^th century BCE, we discovered numerous fragments of mold-made clay figurines from the Persian-Hellenistic period (4^th-2^nd c. BCE).  These objects, very typical to the region and period, became intermingled with the earlier remains when activities in a later period (probably Roman-Byzantine) were carried out in this part of the site.  We assume that the tremendous number of figurines is a result of the existence of a cult center at the site, but we do not know whether these figurines were made locally or imported.  We are conducting analyses of the clay used to determine their origin.  A new branch of the figurines analysis is the study of fingerprints left by their makers, which might help find out whether they were produced by a single or multiple artists.

All these analyses are performed by several experts located at academic institutions and labs in several countries and require financial output.  The Heilbrun Fellowship will support in part the expenses involved in these analyses that will provide information to be included in the publication of the final results.