The Citing Slavery Project, spearheaded by Michigan State University professor Justin Simard, acknowledges and discusses the modern citation of slave cases. Modern court cases continue to cite slave cases as precedent, legitimizing slavery by fitting cases involving enslaved people into standard legal categories.

Modern legal databases are complex and difficult to navigate, requiring researchers to spend time and energy searching for the right cases. Our software renovates the current system, bringing a fresh look as well as implementing robust searching strategies used by educators, students, lawyers, and the general public.

Our Citing Slavery Data Presentation website focuses on making slavery court case data accessible by offering a simple, easy-to-use website. Our site is modern and approachable to anyone, including users with disabilities.

The site’s key attribute is its universal search feature, located at the top of every page. Extensive filtering options are achieved via the court case table page, enabling users to organize thousands of court cases by various criteria.

A major concern of the Citing Slavery Project is the accuracy of citing cases as many historic cases contain inaccurate citations, causing associations between invalid cases. The website automatically verifies each court case, flagging all that require approval by law students or professionals. Furthermore, the Project provides case summaries that exclude complex legal jargon so users can understand the importance of each case.

Our website works on any device with a web browser, including mobile devices and computers.

Our front end is written in SvelteKit, the back end is written in Ruby on Rails, and data is stored in a PostgreSQL database. Our software is hosted via Railway. The project utilizes OpenAI embeddings for semantic searching and case summaries.