About

Giuliana Perrone is an Associate Professor and Faculty Director in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 2015. Her research focuses on the history of slavery and race in North America, American socio-legal history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the development of American political institutions. Perrone is particularly interested in the multiple approaches to studying slavery, how concepts of race have shaped American legal and political identities over time, and the operation of courts during times of crisis and radical transition. Her current work explores an unappreciated history of reparations, specifically researching the wills of enslavers who bequeathed valuable items to bondspeople. She investigates how these bequests, often justified similarly to modern reparations, can expand understanding of reparatory discourse both historically and in contemporary contexts. Perrone has published on topics such as lawsuits by emancipated people seeking to honor enslavers’ bequests, arguing that enslavers believed reparations were due and that there was a shared understanding of reparations as generational. Her scholarship includes a book titled "Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law" and various articles examining slavery, citizenship, and legal history. Perrone’s work contributes to the understanding of American history through the lens of slavery, race, law, and justice.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Medicine
• Gerontology
• Psychology
• Law and economics
• Art
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Review: <i>I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction</i>, by Kidada E. Williams

  The Public Historian · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Gerontology
  • Medicine
  PublisherDOI

• Wreck and Ruin

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter locates the link between slavery and capitalism in the mundane transactions between and the financial plans of white southerners that were adjudicated following the Civil War. Decisions in these suits helped ensure that the relationship between slavery and American economic development remained undisturbed, and reveal an underappreciated aspect of the incompatibility of liberal capitalism with abolition.

  PublisherDOI

• Final Failure

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines a collection of suits decided by the U.S. Supreme Court that together privileged antebellum interpretations of doctrine over the promise of the Reconstruction Amendments, standardized the responses to post-emancipation litigation across state lines, and, ultimately, prevented abolition. The Court adopted the majority views developed at the state level as a blueprint for the edifice of Jim Crow.

  PublisherDOI

• Back into the Days of Slavery

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Suits related to freedpeople's marriages – the linchpin of familial legitimacy – put the disabilities of the slave past, rather than newly granted rights, at the center of discussions about freedom and abolition. In each, a domestic conflict exposed the need to consider the previous actions and intentions of freedpeople, and prompted an assessment of how the established laws and customs of domesticity could be applied to those formerly excluded from their protection. Rather than exposing the ways that race and former status determined whether freedpeople were entitled to equal rights, this chapter considers whether former status prevented some rights – including the most fundamental among them – from being enjoyed at all.

  PublisherDOI

• Life after the Death of Slavery

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter begins an extended exploration of how judges conceptualized the emancipated person. It illuminates the pivotal connection between cases that asked judges to resolve disputes that had grown out of slavery (e.g., contracts for the sale of an enslaved person) and those that required them to consider the rights of newly freed people (e.g., the right to testify). It traces judicial deliberations, analyzes the law's power to "make and unmake persons," and considers the effects of that power on freedpeople. As property in persons was destroyed, freedpeople emerged – phoenix-like – from the ashes. In this formulation, emancipation revived the formerly "dead" enslaved person, as she emerged from the wreckage of the peculiar institution.

  PublisherDOI

• The Contract Controversy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  A deeply contentious judicial debate over the enforcement of contracts for the sale or hire of enslaved people erupted as one of legal Reconstruction's central battles. This chapter explains the doctrinal approaches favored by judges, analyzes their underlying legal rationales, and explores the consequences of choosing one rationale over the others. It argues that a fundamental disagreement about the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment caused the judicial discord. The outcome of that disgreement – the enforcement of contracts – permanently weakened the power and potential of the Thirteenth Amendment.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The introduction begins an exploration of abolitionist jurisprudence and the judges who practiced it. It explains the difference between emancipation and abolition and the way the book uses and builds on existing abolitionist theory. It maps the books argument: that legacies of slavery survive in private law, which modern abolitionists have missed.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

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  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• The Grave Question

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the legality of unions between racially heterodox people. It asks readers to consider miscegenation suits decided in the 1860s and 1870s solely in the context of Reconstruction-era efforts to achieve abolition. Observing the suits from this perspective reveals an important moment of flux in the history of American abolition and reveals the central arguments that would be used to undermine equal citizenship.

  PublisherDOI

• Confederate Reckonings

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter delves more deeply into some issues already explored to explain how the existence of the Confederacy complicated judicial decision-making. Judges considered how the exigencies of war shaped personal disputes, rendered verdicts on contracts executed during the war, and examined the use of Confederate currency in those agreements. In doing so, they intervened in the longstanding debate over the right of secession, considered the lingering effects of the Confederacy's existence, and contributed to political discussions about who had the legal authority to enact Reconstruction policy and what shape it could take.

  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• University of California President’s Faculty Research Fellow…
• William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Scholar Fell…
• John Hope Franklin Prize Honorable Mention, Law & Society As…
• Shapiro Award Finalist, 2025
• Penny Pether Law and Language Scholarship Award, 2025