Twenty-five years ago this month, Amy Siskind filed the first lawsuit related to the slave trade in French courts.
Siskind’s late husband, Jeffrey Siskind, had helped her write her dissertation in France and taught at Harvard Law School. He was an advocate for enslaved Africans and his advocacy — and his death in a collision with a speeding train — brought the struggle against the slave trade to Paris.
Amy Siskind, who did not speak French, decided to sue the national railroad company in French court to help enforce the new law banning slavery in France. It was one of a handful of cases filed by Americans seeking freedom from slavery in French courts.
Her three-year legal odyssey in French courts began when she first learned of the French government’s 1994 abolition of slavery through a research paper by a young man researching laws of slavery in France. She noticed that the new law helped the owners of slaves to avoid responsibility, since it no longer applied to private businesses in France. While France did not directly criminalize the sale of slaves, its abolition law left the matter in private hands.
Siskind suspected that the rail company, SNCF, a state-owned company that had been created to support the French Revolution, could profit from slave labor. After the abolition law in France, SNCF and the rail-company-aided private company that ran the train line responded to public inquiries and ads about finding railroad work with written contracts that made it possible for the slave-owners to avoid liability.
To protect the abolition law, Amy Siskind took her first steps to obtain French court papers, paying 300 euros ($350) in required fees. Amy Siskind then showed up at a railway official’s door and asked for the papers, saying she had a copy of them in her pocket and was sending the documents through a friend. When her request was rejected, she knew she had a case. A year later, Amy Siskind presented documents in court from an African slave owner naming five names of slaves (several of whom had escaped slavery to France), maps of the plantation where the slaves were working and asking the court to pay money to the former owner for his slave’s freedom. She also presented documents detailing the passage of the U.S. slavery act that she knew governed her complaint.
Amy Siskind argued that the French law’s employer provisions covered SNCF and the rail company-aided rail-company. She pointed out that the railroad was specifically built to support the October Revolution and that the abolition law only applied to privately-owned businesses. The railroad company-a rail company-a railway company — was merely a corporation authorized to work with state actors to build a railroad, to carry out the requirements of the French Constitution.
The trial and appeal she later had a positive result. The French Supreme Court decided that the law did not apply to the railroad company-a rail company-a railroad company. It ordered the railway company-a rail company-a railway company to pay 1,150 euros (around $1,000) to an enslaved black woman who had won her lawsuit against the railroad company-a railroad company-a railway company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-a railroad company-