Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Spring 2003
Abstract
Studies of nineteenth century legal history assume that the antebellum South, and antebellum South Carolina in particular, had a legal culture shaped by honor culture and marked by the hierarchical assumptions and extralegal violence that honor culture engendered. In this article, I offer a modification of that well-established account. While I do not question the influence of honor on South Carolina's antebellum legal culture, I suggest that the state had a second, shame-based system of popular justice, in which women played a prominent role. As was the case with honor culture, this second form of extralegal justice, which I have dubbed the informal courts of public opinion, sometimes intersected with formal law, and other times worked independent of it.
Recommended Citation
Elizabeth Dale, A Different Sort of Justice: The Informal Courts of Public Opinion in Antebellum South Carolina, 54 S.C. L. Rev. 627 (2003), available at http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub/400