Keywords
Property Law, Louisiana Civil Code, Corporations, Absolute Dominium, Property Theory, Slavery, Gradual Emancipation, Freedom of the Womb, Partus Sequitur Ventrem
Abstract
Over the past year, the Louisiana legal community has celebrated the bicentennial of the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code with enthusiasm, observing its solidification of the civil law tradition in Louisiana and documenting its importance in the spread of civil law throughout the Americas. This Article focuses on three areas of the 1825 Civil Code that have generally not attracted significant scholarly attention in Louisiana but that have important socio-legal significance.
First, the Article addresses twenty articles appearing toward the end of Book I of the Civil Code that allow, define, and regulate corporations. Even though private corporations were still rare and suspicious legal creatures at the time, the 1825 Civil Code’s provisions on corporations foreshadowed a day when this uniquely powerful juridical entity would dominate commerce in Louisiana and elsewhere, providing a remarkably succinct genetic coding for modern capitalism.
Next, the Article addresses eleven articles that appear near the beginning of Book II that provide the architectural framework for a strong rights-based conception of ownership that foregrounds exclusion and owner-autonomy but simultaneously accommodates a flourishing of lesser, imperfect forms of real rights in things. The inclusion of these articles on ownership mirrored a major trend in civil law in the first half of the nineteenth century that Anna di Robilant terms the rise of “absolute dominium” or the “Romanist-Bourgeois” conception of property.
Finally, this Article teases out the significance of a handful of provisions in Books I and II of the 1825 Civil Code, stating that the children of an enslaved woman belong to the owner of that woman. This rule, known as “partus sequitur ventrem,” was present in the 1808 Digest and was important in other slave societies in North America. The Article situates the decision to preserve partus sequitur ventrem in light of contemporary developments in the United States and argues that preservation of the rule was a conscious and significant choice made by the Louisiana legal elite in light of movements in both North and South America to reject the rule and recognize an alternative approach that emphasized birthright freedom in the United States and “the freedom of the womb” in Latin America.
Repository Citation
John A. Lovett,
Variations on Property and Power: Corporations, Absolute Dominium, and Partus Sequitur Ventrem in the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code,
18 J. Civ. L. Stud.
(2026)
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/jcls/vol18/iss1/5