Expert in the history of civilian jurisprudence and of mixed common law and civil law jurisdictions, Vernon Valentine Palmer has written an erudite, well-researched, and intriguing account of developing slave law in the French Antilles, Territory of Orleans, and the state of Louisiana, from the mid-seventeenth century to the United States Civil War. Based on close examination of original documents at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer, Palmer argues persuasively in chapter one that the 1685 Code Noir promulgated by Louis XIV to regulate slavery in his Caribbean possessions drew relatively little on Roman law. In doing so, he discounts the well-known arguments of legal historians Alan Watson and Hans Baade to the contrary. According to Palmer, the local redactors based the new code mostly on established French slavery customs and related arrêts set out by the Sovereign Councils of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Christophe in the preceding four decades.

Similarly to the work of legal historians in the last two decades emphasizing the agency of African-American slaves, such as Ira Berlin, Loren Schweninger, and Laura Edwards, chapter two shows that the economic and cultural practices of masters and slaves in Louisiana diverged substantially from its 1724 version of the Code Noir and Spanish slave law after 1769. This was, Palmer emphasizes, a process of struggle between owners and slaves that implicated slave hours of work and free time, marriage, exemption from work on the Sabbath, the provision ground system, the practice by which slaves possessed property (peculium), and avenues of manumission. Slaves were, under law, “rightless,” but they managed to obtain from their masters a certain number of personal and property rights.

In chapter three, Palmer discusses the process by which the legislatures of the Territory of Orleans and the new state of Louisiana integrated legal provisions for slavery with a European-style civil code for the first time in modern history. The territorial legislature passed a relatively repressive Black Code in 1806–7 that borrowed heavily from American slave statutes, but eminent jurisconsult Moreau Lislet took the lead in drafting an 1808 digest that sought to meld the civil law with race-neutral slavery provisions. In both the Digest of 1808 and the Civil Code of 1825, drafters went back to Spanish-Roman sources to retrieve uncodified slave rules and principles to resolve unanswered questions. Palmer maintains that these processes “created the conditions for a systematic and coherent jurisprudence of slavery” and made slavery-related litigation the prime business of the courts until the end of the antebellum period (138).

Palmer's discussion of slavery jurisprudence under the 1808 Digest and the 1825 Civil Code in the last chapter maintains that the Louisiana Supreme Court further Romanized and systematized the novel slave law–civil law hybrid that these codifications had produced. With a “Digest Methodology,” he argues, the Court went outside the post-1803 Louisiana statutes to draw on the ius commune and Spanish Siete Partidas to reconcile conflicts between its slave and traditional civil law provisions, involving such problems as prescription and the statuliber, a distinctive device-created fourth caste, often in ways that tempered the increasingly repressive slave regime of Louisiana. This was, he concludes, an endeavor that entailed “one of the most remarkable displays of classical learning by any court in the United States” (xv).

Through the Codes Darkly demonstrates that Palmer is a deeply interested and talented investigator of the civil law and its history. His commitment to examining carefully both the legal and socioeconomic contexts of changing slave law, and their dynamic relationship, is refreshing and immensely valuable, but chapter two could benefit considerably from more investigation of primary materials showing how French and Spanish slave law and custom interfaced in local tribunals. Records left by provincial councils, notaries public, greffiers royale, district commandants, and Roman Catholic clerics would almost certainly enrich the analysis. Chapter three might allow that there was a notable increase of slave-related jurisprudence in most of the common-law Deep South slave states after the War of 1812, a phenomenon related to the expansion of the so-called “Cotton Kingdom” and associated transportation, communications, and market revolutions. Chapter four might explain how the 1828 rejection of pre-1803 Spanish and Roman statute law by the Louisiana legislature affected the ability of the Louisiana Supreme Court to rely on the ius commune and Roman juridical sources. By the same token, the last chapter might engage more thoroughly the argument made by legal historian Judith K. Schafer showing a rapid Americanization of Louisiana slave law thereafter to 1860. But these omissions do not lessen the important contribution that Through the Codes Darkly makes. And the inclusion in the appendix of the author's excellent original translation of the entire 1724 Code Noir, with facing original French version, will prove invaluable to scholars interested in this thriving area of legal history.