Comment on Hans Baade’s <i>The</i> Gens de Couleur <i>of Louisiana: Comparative Slave Law in Microcosm</i>

Hans Baade invented colonial Louisiana legal history. Before he started doing research in the eighteenth-century records in New Orleans and elsewhere, virtually no serious historical work involving the judicial and notarial archives of colonial Louisiana had ever been done. Professor Baade also undertook years ago to trace the various French and Spanish statutory enactments that bore on Louisiana legal history, and this proved to be a virtually impenetrable mare's nest. Before Professor Baade began his work, most of what had been written about Louisiana's colonial legal past was both amateurish and antiquated.

It should therefore come as no surprise that I am in no position to offer any penetrating criticisms of Professor Baade's paper. Besides, because of my recent fall from grace (I am currently a provincial magistrate and local antiquary), what I have to say might plausibly come freighted with a presumptive skepticism in your minds.