Allocating Honor and Acting Honorably: Some Reflections Provoked by the Cardozo Conference on Slavery

I begin by focusing on some of the comments by Stanley Katz and others about Judge Thomas Ruffin, the famous author of the egregious North Carolina opinion, State v. Mann, and its endorsement, at least as a legal matter, of a master's absolute power over the slave. Can one have, as apparently Harriet Beecher Stowe did, "deep respect for the man" Ruffin even as one despises the system that he served? Would we, for example, wish to honor him by placing his portrait in American law schools as a presumed inspiration to further generations of law students as to what it means to be a "distinguished" lawyer or judge, or does authorship of State v. Mann disqualify him from any such honor? This is simply part of a much broader question in regard to what might be described as the semiotics or "political economy" of public homage.

By what criteria do we decide whom to build statues of-or whose statues to leave up throughout time-or whom to place on currency or put on postage stamps?