Variations on Power and Property: Corporations, Absolute Dominium, and Partus Sequitur Ventrem in the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code

Over the past year, the Louisiana legal community has celebrated the bicentennial of the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code with enthusiasm observing its solidification of the civil law tradition in Louisiana and documenting its importance in the spread of civil law throughout the Americas. This Article focusses on three areas of the 1825 Civil Code that have generally have not attracted significant scholarly attention in Louisiana but that have important socio-legal significance: (1) twenty articles appearing toward the end of Book I that allow, define, and regulate corporations; (2) eleven articles that appear near the beginning of Book II that provide the architectural framework for a strong right-based conception of ownership that foregrounds exclusion and owner-autonomy but simultaneously accommodates a flourishing of lesser, imperfect forms of real rights in things; and (3) a handful of provisions in Books I and II stating that the children of an enslaved woman belong to the owner of that woman. The Article situates these often ignored portions of the 1825 Civil Code within broader developments regarding corporations in the United States, the rise of “absolute dominium” or “Romanis-Bourgeois” property in the civil law world, and changing justifications for slavery in the United States South and movements towards gradual emancipation and “freedom of the womb” in other parts of North and South America

 

About Professor John Lovett

John A. Lovett is a passionate teacher and scholar of property law and has been a member of the Louisiana State University Law Faculty since January 2024.  

Prior to joining LSU, Lovett was a member of the faculty at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2002, became full professor in 2009, and served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Development from 2012 to 2015. He held the De Van D. Daggett Jr. Distinguished Professorship at Loyola from 2012 to 2023.

Professor Lovett has deep connections to the academic legal community in Scotland where he has lectured many times. At the University of Edinburgh Law School, he was a McCormick Fellow in 2009 and a Visiting Professor from 2017 to 2020. He has been Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh Law School since 2020. In the spring of 2023, Lovett was a Glasgow Law Fellow at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Lovett also serves as a member of the Land and Human Rights Advisory Forum for the Scottish Land Commission.