History Through the Law: A Conversation with Professor Sidney Chalhoub

This interview was conducted in Spring 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): Could you please tell me about your historical interests and how you use the law to inform your work in this area?

Professor Sidney Chalhoub (SC): I think there are two ways of approaching this conversation. One is historians using judicial records as sources for their studies, and the other is how historians approach legislation or legal issues as a way of understanding historical processes. In terms of sources, I think the best way of doing this is to tell you a little bit about my own experience with archives. My main interest when I became a historian was to understand the experience of the subaltern. I was interested in understanding workers, studying enslaved workers, wage workers, and how they dealt with labor relations and social relations they were part of, given the types of exploitative labor relations to which they were subject. In the 1980s, it was studied how, quite often, marginalized workers in general confront situations with the repressive apparatus, the police. The idea was to try to read sources, for example, criminal trial records, to try to understand how these episodes that are discussed in trial records can allow us a window into the daily experiences of workers. Of course, we know that what people say in court is not necessarily how they saw things happening, or sometimes they know that things happen a bit differently, or they are completely lying or inventing versions. But it's also true that in this trial, records for any version, for any narrative to obtain a desired legal impact, the version has to be plausible, so there must be a plausibility to the story. For historians, the idea of plausibility is all we need, in many ways, to understand the possibilities there are in that society for people to act one way or the other depending on the circumstances. There is a peculiarity too, which is, in the Iberian tradition, legal records, for example, in the 19th century or early 20th century, tended to be more detailed than in the US, which becomes quite clear when studying slavery. So, to understand the daily experience of workers through legal archives, it is possible to analyze trial records, involving crimes, but also involving civil cases, property transactions, or conflicts having to do with slavery because you have very wealthy, very rich sources in Brazilian archives, in Latin America, archives where slavery existed. The first thing was reading very carefully, knowing that these documents have specific protocols that need to be understood. So you need to get some legal training in 19th-century law and legislative processes of creating laws and application of these laws, you have to know the protocols, the formats, and the narratives that they carry. You need to pay attention to do things, but it is possible to navigate these protocols and formats to also understand how people's experiences are a part of the tales being told. It's not a question of reading them to know whether they are truthful or false, but you read them as a window into possibilities of social behavior and social actions and the micro politics of daily life. So you learn a lot if you read these documents with this type of is, and this is what I would like to say first, at least, about sources.

HULR: Great, and did you say there was a second piece to that answer?

SC: Yes, the second piece is about how historians approach legal issues. For example, let’s think of how to approach a free birth law — a piece of legislation that has its main objective the freedom of children born of enslaved women, which happened in many slave societies in the 19th century. It happened in the US, Cuba, Brazil, and other places. If you want to understand a piece of legislation about emancipation, it's very important, first, if possible, if there are sources, to try to understand how this piece of legislation came into being; so, for example, how they were discussed in the parliament. What were the arguments in favor and against it? Which were the aspects of the law that were most controversial? In the case of free wombs in Brazil, there was a controversy that contextualized the making of the law. There are two ways to become a free person, they imagined, if you were born of an enslaved womb. One possibility is that the baby is going to be born a slave, because it's the offspring of an enslaved womb, and then immediately, by birth, become freed, right? So you follow the logic that the condition of the baby follows the condition of the womb. It is coming from an enslaved womb and can only have as an offspring an enslaved baby. But because the law says that nobody born after a certain date is going to live in slavery, this person is immediately freed and becomes a free person. Another possibility they discussed was that the law created a kind of dichotomy, which is that the body of the enslaved mother continues to be enslaved. The mother remained under slavery, but the law created the fiction that an enslaved person could have a free womb. In that sense, the offspring of that free womb is already born free. This makes a lot of difference because if you call the baby freed, you recognize the proprietor, that is, the slave owner, has a right to claim compensation for the property that they lost. If you consider the womb free, that person will be born without having ever been a property of anybody, and then this would make it more difficult, or would make it impossible, to ask for compensation for us, for a select property lost that you had never had in the first place. There would be great litigation about this, because some people would argue, “How can you create a fiction that an enslaved woman has a free womb?” And then people would respond, “Well, how can you create a fiction that a human being can be property?” And then the whole thing would go on. So the historian has to understand how the law came into being, the controversies around drafting the law, how it was applied, how different social sectors and social agents appropriated the law with different purposes, and how the courts adjudicated controversies having to do with the law.

HULR: What inspired you to use legal sources and examine legal archives?

SC: I think the reason was that I wanted to understand the experience of working people, enslaved people, women, and the poor. And this seemed to be a body of sources, a variety of evidence that exists in great quantity in Brazil. They’re sources about humble people that usually nobody is interested in studying. And they are interesting to study, especially when you have access to their collective experience, and there are abundant sources about them in judicial records, which creates an incredible possibility of understanding. Also, because there is this tradition of filing police records and not throwing them away, they were there. Sometimes lots of personal documents get lost; in Brazil, there's not that much of a tradition of keeping family papers of poor people. Even regarding organizations for the poor, it's sometimes very hard to find their papers, and they don't survive. Within legal archives, again, paradoxically, because this was a very big slave society, and so many workers were enslaved, and because this was a form of property, you tend to keep records of the properties that you have. And then you end up having more sources than you had about wage workers, in 19th-century Brazil; you have access to more sources about the slave workers.

HULR: Could you expand on the training process of reading legal archives? How does that differ from being trained as a historian, and how does it change the engagement with sources?

SC: I think that when historians approach certain types of documents, let's suppose, in my case, we are talking about historical work that I've done, reading legal sources from 19th-century Brazil. The ideal situation would be if I got a law degree from a law school in Rio, let's say, in the 1850s, and acquired all this kind of legal expertise that would be worth nothing today, but it could be very useful for me to navigate the sources I will be reading at that time. You don't need to get to that extreme, because, for example, I've used the legal sources without ever really wanting to write legal history in any traditional sense. I was more interested in social history. I want to understand how people are dealing with these situations, and how going to court is sometimes one of the options they may have, among others, to deal with daily situations that they experience in relation to their masters, labor, and family. So you need to be prepared, because it's very dangerous if you read the sources without any knowledge of the kind of protocols that are informing them—what kind of legal structure, what kind of legislation is informing them. If I'm reading a trial record, either a civil or criminal trial record, having to do with slavery, what I normally do is read and try to understand the story. And the lawyers involved in the trial start citing laws and dispositions, and I go after them and see what that law is, how that is deployed here. There are always legal periodicals; these are sometimes cited too, or you can find examples that are similar, or discuss the type of things that you see in the records. And so you have to try to get some literacy. You don't need to get a full law degree from 1850 law school, but you need to require some literacy into the kind of legal language, technical language that is being used so that the more skillful you can become in understanding how the sources, despite all the protocols and the formats that constrain them, can also give you important information about people's experiences in regard to each other, to their community, and the conflicts that they they are having with each other.

HULR: Can you speak to how the language and the structure of the law can either reflect or distort the realities of the marginalized populations that you're studying?

SC: There are many examples, and I’ll give you one. I have found several cases of conflicts between the working class, and in general, relatively poor people, that fight because both workers were in love with the same woman and were in competition for the woman, or one of them thought that the other one had been disrespectful towards the other in some way, or maybe they drank too much and had a fight that ended in tragedy. A homicide usually happened between people who knew each other really well. We know that today, lots of homicides are happening in many societies among people who kill people they had no connection to before—but that was very rare in the past and became more common in very recent human history. And so that means that in a homicide trial record, sometimes you find people speaking in extreme detail about their daily lives because they need to make sense of what's going on. The authorities in charge of the case are also much more willing to listen, because this is a community crisis. And then they speak about what they knew about the relations between the people involved in the trial. Although the questions can be more or less the same ones that they ask about any violence, the answers, because this is a profound community crisis, will be a little more unpredictable than if you're dealing with a simple case in which things will be more formatted and people would not be encouraged to speak much. But if you're talking this way, in the literature, homicide trial records are usually seen as the richest ones because it's a major moment of crisis, and then people tend to go off the script or off what is expected of them, because they want to speak about a crisis.

HULR: Are there moments where you've seen resistance from workers or enslaved people through the law? How do people try to go against those constraints?

SC: Yes, I have a good example, which is from my own experience again, but this is not at all only in Brazil. Courts in Brazil are full of examples of enslaved people who go to court to try to achieve freedom. This is an example in which an enslaved person could go to court and eventually be successful in obtaining freedom, irrespective of the will of the proprietor of the master. In 19th-century Brazil and several other slave societies, the will of the master was absolutely essential to determine the condition of an enslaved person. For example, if a master makes a promise of freedom to an enslaved woman. Let's suppose that this is a master who has a woman who has been serving him for a long time, and then he's sick, this woman is taking care of him, and then, before he dies, he writes a will in which he says that, upon his death, this woman should become a freed person. When the master dies, the heirs are not happy with this disposition, and the will the master wrote disappears because they don't want anybody to know that he wanted the enslaved person to become freed. Let's suppose that this woman remembers the promise, although she does not have any legal document, but she has witnesses, members of the family who overheard it and are willing to protect her: freed people who heard and want to support her legal case. Then, she can go to court against the heirs, saying that the will of her former master was that she become freed upon his death, and the heirs, in contradicting the master's will, are acting unlawfully. In many cases, the witnesses are trustworthy and tell a similar story. Depending on the judge, eventually, enslaved people would, for example, in a situation like this, obtain freedom. It's interesting, because they were seeking freedom while confirming a major tenet of that slave society, which is that total control belongs to the master; what the enslaved person is doing to get her freedom is affirming that the master who had total control of the situation and willed her to be freed was not having his will obeyed by the heirs. They were playing with a major tenant of the slave society in order to become free. It’s nothing revolutionary. They were actually using the institutional framework to obtain freedom within the rules that the slave society itself established. It's a resistance from within the system—the legal structure allowed enslaved people to use it to their advantage depending on the circumstances.

HULR: Looking more broadly, I know you said before that you don't class yourself as a legal historian. You're rather a social historian who looks at the law. Are there certain questions that, as a social historian, you wish that legal scholars would be more concerned about?

SC: That's an interesting question. First of all, I'm not familiar enough with what colleagues would call legal history to understand what is not being done. But what I always find interesting, and I'm sure there are people doing this in legal history, is the coexistence of different systems of law in the same society, and how these different systems of law interact. So, for example, this can go from, in mid-19th-century Brazil, you had most coffee plantation areas, or in Rio, a big city, the majority of enslaved people were from Africa, sometimes with the same ethnicities, but not always. They had their own religious organizations, communities, and ways of organizing labor. Even under slavery, especially in the urban areas, people had significant autonomy on how to get up, to get out there, and get an income to bring back to the master, and so on. And they had their own codes of conduct and ways of punishing misconduct. I’m interested in how these systems interact with the legal system that was established by the colonial power or the national power after Brazil became independent. For instance, we can think of a case about proving whether a girl who had been deflowered was promiscuous, and thus to be held personally responsible. What the case shows is that there were codes of good conduct among the working class that had nothing to do with this bourgeois code of conduct for women. For example, and I saw this many times, these girls sometimes would go to the police and, when asked questions, they would give all the wrong answers. They said they went out alone at night, they did not go with a male member of the family, and they met their boyfriend alone. When pressed by the authorities about this type of behavior, the response was along the lines of “Well, but he is my only boyfriend.” Instead of “Charlotte's not promiscuous because she had only one boyfriend,” which represents one kind of conduct about being faithful to someone, while legal powers had different ways of asserting their virtue systems that did not match the expectations. And so what I find fascinating are these different codes that govern behavior, and I'm understanding the “legal” here broadly as codes of conduct that allow in a given community for people to think that someone deserves a penalty or not. I think this topic is being studied; I think there are colleagues in legal history, of course, interested in what they call “legal pluralism”, or other things that try to understand these different interactions. But this is very complex, and as a historian, I'm interested less in the codes themselves, but in what people do with these codes that they recognize are there, and how they navigate them, how they maneuver within them. I'm more interested in the experience of social agents, even in these situations, I'm less interested in the description of the codes and more in understanding how people navigate them, the perspective of those who are actually in relation with these codes.

HULR: Thank you for your time; it was a pleasure to interview you.