The core legal dispute is whether an enslaved person’s image counts as cultural property

Evidence

It also made me ponder the question Murray asks in her essay, “Who owns the rights to the violent events of the past?” Just as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s presentation helped me understand that the daguerreotypes were the plunder of slavery, Murray articulated the legal issue that had been nagging at me since the conference: “More fundamentally, did Harvard indeed own the daguerreotypes, which would clinch their copyright and contract claims? And if they did, should they own images of enslaved people that Agassiz won through violent coercion? Or should we regard these relics as cultural property belonging to African-Americans, which should be returned to the descendants of African-born enslaved people?” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 662

Categorization

• DEFINE: States precisely the two competing doctrinal framings Lanier and Harvard each push.