Hegel’s Slaves, Blackstone’s Objects, and Hohfeld’s Ghosts: A Comment on Thomas Russell’s Imagery of Slave Auctions

Thomas Russell's wonderful paper A New Image of the Slave Auction is an example of how the best empirical work can result in conclusions that are so obviously "right" that they risk being mistaken as obvious. His paper serves as an important warning against a recurring problem in legal, as well as other scholarship: Picture thinking-in the sense of an unconscious (and as a result, unquestioning and uncritical) acceptance of familiar, traditional, comfortable imagery-so often blinds us.