When Justin Simard was conducting research for his dissertation, he came across a case predating the Civil War related to slavery that was cited as precedent in 2012. He started looking for other slavery citations from the past 30 years, thinking he’d find one or two. Instead, he found more than 300.

“What I thought would be a footnote in my dissertation highlighting the odd decisions of a few judges turned into a broader examination of the legal profession’s treatment of slave cases,” says Simard, assistant professor of law at Michigan State University. “Not only are we ratifying their treatment as property in the past but also continuing to treat them as property in the present.”

Simard started the Citing Slavery Project to document the history and continued legacy of the law of slavery in the United States.

To date, Simard and his team of law students have found more than 7,000 cases involving enslaved people and have created a database of cases from the 20th and 21st centuries that continue to cite them as precedent.

“One of the most surprising things I’ve found is how extensively these cases are cited for so many different reasons,” Simard says. “There’s just so many areas of law—criminal law, property law, criminal procedure—all because in the 19th century, there were so many slave cases. And this is such an important formative era in making American law that just basic ground rules are established in that time. In just about any legal issue you can think of, cases of enslaved people are cited.”

Simard explains that the American legal system is a common law system, meaning that decisions made today are built on decisions of the past. So, when a judge or lawyer has a question, they look back to find comparable questions that have been answered in the past. When they find cases, judges “cite” a case as a way of presenting a similar example.

Read the full article about judges continuing to cite slavery cases by Kim Ward at Futurity.