Breach By Violence: Sharecropper Litigation with Brittany Farr

Taboo Trades

In this episode, UVA Law 3L Marley Peters and I interview Brittany Farr, Assistant Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Farr is a scholar of private law and race. With more than a decade of interdisciplinary training, her research draws on history, legal theory, and cultural studies to theorize how marginalized populations have availed themselves of otherwise inhospitable legal regimes. In particular, her research focuses on enslaved and free African Americans’ use of contract law during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interrogates the ways in which contract law mediated African Americans’ relationship to bodily autonomy, economic freedom, and legal agency both during and after slavery.

We’re discussing her article, Breach By Violence, forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, which analyzes the use of private law by sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South to address violent breaches of contract by landlords.

Brittany Farr NYU Homepage: https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=57053

Interview with Samuel James (S. J.) and Leonia Farrar, May 28, 2003.
Interview K-0652. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/playback.html?base_file=K-0652&duration=01:29:20

Oral history with 84 year old black female, Joiner, Arkansas https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000030