Rebecca

J.

Scott

Her most recent book is Jean Hébrard and Rebecca J. Scott, De l’Esclavage à la liberté (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2026). Scott and Hébrard previously co-authored Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012). Both books trace one family’s interaction with law and official documents across five generations, from West Africa to the Americas to Europe. Freedom Papers received the 2012 Albert Beveridge Book Award in American History and the James Rawley Book Prize in Atlantic History, both from the American Historical Association.

Among Scott’s recent articles are “Discerning a Dignitary Offense: The Concept of Equal ‘Public Rights’ during Reconstruction,” Law and History Review 38 (August, 2020): 519-553; the co-authored “Impunity for Acts of Peremptory Enslavement: James Madison, the U.S. Congress, and the Saint-Domingue Refugees,” with Andrew J. Walker, Ana María Silva, Jane C. Manners, and Jean M. Hébrard, William and Mary Quarterly, (July 2022); the co-authored “María Coleta and the Capuchin Friar: Slavery, Salvation, and the Adjudication of Status,” with Carlos Venegas, William and Mary Quarterly (October 2019); and “How Does the Law put a Historical Analogy to Work?: Defining the Imposition of ‘A Condition Analogous to that of a Slave’ in Modern Brazil,” with L.A. de Andrade Barbosa and C.H. Haddad, Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 13 (2017). She is also the author of “Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge,” Michigan Law Review (2008).

Scott is the recipient of a MacArthur Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is past president of the American Society for Legal History.