Slavery, Abortion and The Masks of the Law

 There are physical masks and there are masks that the law creates--legal fictions--to conceal the person beneath the legal mask.

These masks of the law are used to conceal the humanity of those the law wishes to treat harshly. Slaves were masked as "property" to conceal their humanity. Unborn babies are masked as "potential lives" by Roe v Wade and the abortion liberty. Masks--whether physical or legal--conceal the face (and thus the humanity and individual personhood) of the person behind the mask. 

Here is a video of a CLE I gave last year--at the Nebraska Bar's Annual Meeting--on how the masks of the law can be used to treat persons as nonpersons (as property) when the law wishes to act harshly and unjustly:

https://use.vg/jQuD5e

 In this video, I discuss how the masks of the law enabled slavery in the past and abortion in the present. The idea is not so much to debate legal abortion as to understand how the masks of the law can be used to obscure the reality and human dignity of human persons.