Campbell University law professor Anthony Baker spent the last year traveling the globe and sharing his views on slavery and other issues of race through the lens of legal history. “I am especially fascinated by the confluence between natural law and common law,” said Baker, who teaches legal history. “The problem is that America is built on a natural law foundation. It’s fascinating to look at this phenomenon through the eyes of slavery. Abandoning natural law is the only way American jurisprudence of the period could justify slavery.”In the 19th century North Carolina court case, the State vs. Hoover, slave-owner John Hoover beat a female slave until she eventually died. Though there were witnesses to the beatings, it was only when the woman died that Hoover was charged with anything, that she became more than “property” in the eyes of the state. Baker presented his research on this case and other racially-charged historical cases, including Dred Scott and Nat Turner at several national and international conferences recently, including the American Historical Association Annual Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii; the Gloucester Summer Legal Conference in Gloucester, England; the Quinnipiac University School of Law in Hamden, Conn.; and the Texas Wesleyan School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas.These themes were especially evident in his recent presentation at a conference at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Supported by the work of German sociologist Norbert Elias, Baker there examined the relationship between power, behavior, emotion and knowledge in his papers. He called upon Elias’ theories that individuals can only be understood in the context of the configurations of society to which they belong, to investigate the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, for example. In this incident, the slave, Turner, and others went door-to-door killing whites, including Turner’s master.”According to Elias, the violence in a community is relevant to everything that has gone on there,” Baker said. “One way to study Nat Turner from an historical perspective is not whether it was right or wrong to commit murder, but according to ‘who’ he was–a product of his own environment, relationships and community.” Baker cited the recent case of the Jena Six as a modern-day legal parallel. The case concerns a group of African American teenagers in Jena, La., who were charged with beating a white teenager after several racially-charged incidents in the town. The Jena Six case sparked protests by those who viewed the arrests and subsequent charges as excessive and racially discriminatory.”We haven’t settled this issue of race yet,” said Baker. “I hope that my work will eventually help lead to a dialogue of racial conciliation.”A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law, Professor Anthony Baker holds a Master of Laws from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy Sciences from Duke University. Prior to coming to Campbell’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law in 2000, Baker was an associate professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, Ca.Photo Copy: Anthony Baker, professor of Legal History at Campbell’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law.
Baker’s work pushes for racial conciliation