Live-blogging and Tweeting the 13th Amendment (#13Amend)

Tomorrow and Saturday, the Law School will be hosting a conference entitled "Slavery, Abolition, and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Thirteenth Amendment." According to the conference web site,

The conference explores the past and present significance of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and provided constitutional authority for eradicating its badges and incidents and, ultimately, for invalidating Jim Crow's legacies and myriad forms of involuntary labor. The amendment has offered powerful protections for individual rights and equal treatment, against wrongs ranging from peonage and housing discrimination to school segregation and trafficking in persons. A wellspring of American civil rights jurisprudence and legislation, it has also inspired global aspirations for human rights. Yet the amendment's enduring emancipatory significance has been little studied. The conference looks anew at the foundations and reach of the Thirteenth Amendment, bringing together scholars in the fields of history, law, philosophy, political science, and literature for robust inquiry into its antislavery career.

The conference, which is free and open to the public, is jointly sponsored by the Law School, the University of Chicago History Department, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Social History Workshop at the University of Chicago, the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago, the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and the American Constitution Society. Participating Law School faculty will include Mary Anne Case, Alison LaCroix, Martha Nussbaum, Gerald Rosenberg, Adam Samaha, and Geof Stone.

While this sort of interdisciplinary scholarly work is not at all unsusal here at the Law School, this conference will be a first for us in at least one way: two of our student bloggers (Bryan Hart and Alex Kolod) will be live-blogging the conference here on the Faculty Blog. If all goes well, we hope to also live blog other upcoming conferences as well.

This conference will also be our first with an assigned Twitter tag. For those of you who follow the Law School on Twitter, each of their posts will be tagged #13Amend so you can easily keep track of them. And if you're attending the conference, we invite you add your own thoughts to the Twitter stream using the same tag.