Slavery

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crimes, whatever their seriousness, were tried before 1788 in slave courts overseen by groups of magistrates and freeholders, without juries.(n4) Although the courts were supposed to keep a record of their proceedings in a distinct book, very little evidence of their day-to-day operation survives, quite likely because many of the magistrates involved failed to observe this legal requirement.(n5) Nor are newspapers, for later periods an important source for the study of court proceedings, available for the period prior to the 1780s.(n6)

As a result of these evidentiary limitations, scholars who have attempted to examine the operation of law in Jamaica and other British Caribbean slave societies have usually relied on analyzing developments in colonial statute law and in particular on the slave codes. These sources are useful: the successive criminalization of more and more actions by slaves, from drumming, to hunting, to gathering after dark provides a telling measure of the ...

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