Professor John W. Cairns joins panel on Transatlantic Abolition and Law at Monticello Conference

John W. Cairns, Professor of Civil Law at Edinburgh Law School, is to appear as part of a panel discussion on Transatlantic Abolition and Law during the Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Conference, 'Transatlantic Slavery Symposium'.

The panel will take place on Monday 9 August 2021.

Dr. Miranda Kaufmann (award-winning author of Black Tudors: The Untold Stories and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London) will lead a panel discussion on how the law and abolition affected the lives of enslaved people on both sides of the Atlantic. Joining her to discuss this topic are Dr. John Cairns (Professor of Civil Law at the University of Edinburgh), Dr. Vincent Brown (Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University), and Dr. Manisha Sinha (James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut).

John W. Cairns is Professor of Civil Law at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, his research has mainly focused on the history of Scots law (particularly legal literature, legal education, and the legal profession in the eighteenth century), slavery and the law (particularly in the eighteenth century), and the legal history of Louisiana and Quebec. He is especially interested, first, in the influence of Smithian historical thinking on the development of academic legal education in Scotland and, second, in how enslavement was managed in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Transatlantic Slavery Symposium - view full conference schedule.