Stoicism, Slavery, and Law: Grotian Jurisprudence and its Reception
Stoicism, Slavery, and Law: Grotian Jurisprudence and its Reception
This chapter examines the Scottish legal system's engagement with slavery in the eighteenth century as well as Hugo Grotius' thinking on Stoicism and law and its impact on later jurisprudence. Extensive involvement of Scots with the Empire in British North America, the Caribbean and India led to the presence at home of enslaved men and women of African and Indian descent. This created a number of difficulties and challenges for Scots law. The chapter first provides an overview of the problem of slavery in Scotland, along with Stoicism and Neostoicism, before discussing Grotius' account of natural law. It then considers slavery in Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis libri tres before discussing how arguments from the ius naturale and ius gentium as set out by Grotius could be used to justify slavery. It also analyses four civil cases concerning slavery in eighteenth-century Scotland.
Keywords: slavery, Hugo Grotius, Stoicism, jurisprudence, Scots law, ius naturale, ius gentium, natural law, Neostoicism
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