Dorothy Brown, ‘Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past’ (2026). Dorothy Brown’s new book Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with our Past shows that ‘the legacy of slavery … is found in every nook and cranny of American life’ (p 164). So it’s hardly surprising to find actual contracts and extreme incursions on freedom of contract in the ongoing ‘trifecta’ of ‘economic exploitation, mass incarceration, and racial violence’ that white America has imposed on African Americans. Brown’s focus is post-13th Amendment, arguing that slavery essentially ‘shape-shifted’ through harms including forced labor (ie, sharecropping and convict leasing), mob violence to punish blacks who built businesses, and, more recently, today’s subprime mortgages. Brown succeeds in building a case for reparations that everyone – including contracts scholars – could and should embrace … (more)
Martha Ertman, JOTWELL, 28 March 2026
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