Read the sources yourself.
Every position the network takes rests on a document you can open: a treaty the United States ratified, a constitutional clause, a court's own words, a statute on the books. This page holds them. Each entry says what the document is, what it is cited for, and where the official copy lives. Court opinions, statutes, and treaty texts are public domain.
Read the document before you quote it. A parenthetical is not a holding. A dissent is not the court. A ballot title is not the law.
Where a copy on this site is a browser print of a public database rather than the court's own PDF, the entry says so.
Slavery has a ratified definition.
Cite in this order. The treaty is the authority. The Guidelines interpret it.
League of Nations, Geneva, September 25, 1926. United States adherence deposited March 21, 1929.
The definition: "the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." The first cite, always.
Geneva, September 7, 1956. United States accession deposited December 6, 1967. Article 9: no reservations permitted.
Reaffirms the 1926 definition by direct reference. The second cite.
Research Network on the Legal Parameters of Slavery.
Interpretive gloss on the 1926 definition: possession as the foundation, then the further powers, substance over form, security of holding. Never cited alone.
United Nations General Assembly, December 10, 1948.
Article 4: "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms." Article 15: everyone has the right to a nationality, and no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of it. The declaration the treaties carry into law.
International Labour Organization, 1930. Not ratified by the United States.
The forced-labour definition carries its own exception for work exacted after a conviction. Why "forced labor" is the weaker frame: the international definition of forced labour excludes prison work; the definition of slavery does not.
Jean Allain. Brill, Leiden, 2008.
The drafting record of the definition the network works from: every draft, debate, and vote behind Article 1(1) of 1926 and the 1953 Protocol and 1956 Convention that carried it forward. Where the treaty is the authority, this is the record of how its words were chosen.
International Law Commission, Draft Conclusions on Peremptory Norms of General International Law (jus cogens), 2022, Annex.
The prohibition of slavery is on the Commission's list of norms from which no derogation is permitted. No government and no electorate can vote slavery lawful.
The exception, and where Congress wrote it.
1787, with the Bill of Rights and Amendments. Amendment XIII, 1865.
The whole instrument, so the exception is read in its place: Article I, Section 2 and the three-fifths clause; Article IV, Section 2 and the fugitive clause; Amendment XIII with the exception; Amendment XIV, Section 2. The exception did not preserve a metaphor. It preserved state power.
Ratified December 6, 1865.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Act of Congress, 1950.
The full formula, in a federal statute only Congress can amend.
Act of Congress, 1954.
"Slavery shall not exist in the Virgin Islands. Involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted by a court of law, shall not exist in the Virgin Islands."
1967.
The full formula, in a constitution that operates under federal oversight.
What the courts have said. Read them whole.
Denver District Court, Case No. 2022CV30421, February 13, 2026 (Wallace, J.). 61 pages.
Colorado Department of Corrections' coercive labor practices held unconstitutional under the Colorado Constitution, Article II, Section 26, as amended by the voters in 2018. The first ruling to give a removal operational force. Decided as involuntary servitude; the court was never asked to say what slavery means.
Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, CL-2024-0710, December 19, 2025.
Alabama removed its exception in 2022. The State pleaded sovereign immunity against its own amendment, and the appeal lost because the penalties alleged were held not to be involuntary servitude. Why the remedy and the immunity waiver go in the text.
974 F.2d 806 (7th Cir. 1992).
A prisoner doing required work "is actually engaged in involuntary servitude, not employment," and the State's control comes "from incarceration itself." The court says it in the State's favor and proves the point: the custody is the source of the power.
15 Cal. 5th 968 (2024).
People never convicted worked unpaid for a private contractor in a county jail, sued for minimum wage, and lost unanimously because a statute still stood. What keeps wage law out of jails is statutes, not the exception. A statute is not an amendment.
390 F.3d 145 (1st Cir. 2004).
Labor obtained by prohibited means "is forced, even if he is paid or compensated for the work." Pay is not a defense.
How the federal exception reaches New Jersey.
New Jersey's constitution says nothing about slavery, so the federal exception governs. No New Jersey court has ever been asked whether the State's prison labor is slavery. The federal court sitting in New Jersey has applied the exception to New Jersey prisoners four times and dismissed every claim with prejudice. The chain runs through these documents.
20 N.J.L. 368 (N.J. Sup. Ct. 1845), affirmed 21 N.J.L. 699 (Err. & App. 1848).
The only New Jersey ruling on slavery as such. The 1844 Constitution declared all persons "by nature free and independent." The court held that declaration did not abolish slavery, which "existed by law in this state" when the constitution took effect.
New Jersey Statutes, Title 30.
The Commissioner sets prison pay. Compensation "may be in the form of cash or remission of time from sentence or both." One day off a sentence for every five days worked. When freedom is the wage, refusing is not free.
New Jersey Administrative Code, Department of Corrections.
Prohibited act .254, refusing to work, and its sanctions: up to 120 days in restrictive housing and 180 days of lost commutation time. The rule that punishes refusal.
184 F.3d 236 (3d Cir. 1999). The circuit that governs New Jersey.
Compelled cafeteria work "did not violate the Thirteenth Amendment" while the plaintiff was duly convicted. The day his conviction was vacated he became a detainee the State could compel at most to housekeeping. Conviction is the switch.
60 F.4th 25 (3d Cir. 2023).
Civil contemnors made to work at a recycling center for five dollars a day. The court, quoting Vanskike on the Amendment's "specific exclusion of prisoner labor," wrote of the unconvicted plaintiffs: "no one can say that not convicted plaintiffs' work belongs to the County." The convicted person's labor does. That is the ownership power, named by the circuit.
No. 3:13-cv-04464 (D.N.J. Jan. 21, 2015). Unpublished.
"A sentenced inmate may reasonably expect to be required to work without compensation as a result of his conviction." Wage and forced-labor claims dismissed with prejudice.
No. 3:13-cv-04968 (D.N.J. May 19, 2014). Unpublished.
"There is no federally protected right of a state prisoner not to work while imprisoned after conviction." Dismissed with prejudice.
No. 2:14-cv-05723 (D.N.J. Dec. 28, 2015). Unpublished.
Two men served thirty-year mandatory minimums, earned about 15,505 work and commutation credits they could never use, and asked to be paid for them on release. The court read the statute as "permissive rather than mandatory" and held the State owed them nothing. Dismissed with prejudice.
No. 3:15-cv-05769 (D.N.J. Aug. 30, 2016).
Same facts, same result. Carries the Department's own letter: it "elects to award both credit and money" though it "has the option of awarding just one as described in statute."
305 N.J. Super. 117 (App. Div. 1997).
The published state rule: no liberty interest in a job, wages, or credits. The opinion never mentions the Thirteenth Amendment. That silence is the record.
167 N.J. 69 (2001).
The State is not an "employer" of its own corrections officers under the wage law, and consent to suit needs "clear and unambiguous legislative expression." Why the waiver goes in the constitution.
442 N.J. Super. 406 (App. Div. 2015).
The State cannot be sued for damages under its own Civil Rights Act. The remedy has to be constitutional.
Nobody can vote slavery lawful. The vote is about the remedy.
The prohibition of slavery admits no derogation. A referendum is not a vote on whether slavery may exist. It is a vote on whether the state constitution will recognize the prohibition, withdraw the State's reliance on the federal exception, and give its own courts the power and the duty to enforce it. Two cases mark the limit of that argument in a domestic court, and both should be read before it is made.
552 U.S. 491 (2008).
A treaty that is not self-executing is not domestic law until Congress implements it. The 1926 definition carries definitional and interpretive weight in a United States court. It is not a cause of action. The amendment supplies the cause of action.
859 F.2d 929 (D.C. Cir. 1988).
When the political branches violate a peremptory norm, "the domestic legal consequences are unclear." And: the prohibitions of murder and slavery "may well restrain our government in the same way that the Constitution restrains it." The State's best answer to the jus cogens argument, and the argument's own hedge, in one opinion.
The record others have built.
Reports, databases, and primary accounts the network reads and cites. Each entry opens the original; where the publisher distributes a PDF, a copy is held here.
American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, 2022. 149 pages.
The national survey of prison labor: who works, at what pay, under what compulsion, and for whose benefit. The most cited factual record in the field.
Adam Davidson, 124 Columbia Law Review 633 (2024).
The regime in one phrase. A century of federal courts holding that a conviction alone triggers the exception, plus fifty-one legislatures handing the decision to prison administrators: no notice that the punishment will be imposed, no reason given, no judge or jury deciding. The article surveys every state's implementation of the exception.
2024.
What removal costs and what it returns, in the states' own figures.
Corporate Accountability Lab.
The private beneficiaries of the exception, named.
Worth Rises.
The companies, the contracts, and the money.
The Sentencing Project.
State by state incarceration rates by race and ethnicity. The State's own counts, which the audits enter as the State's admission against itself.
Database.
Every case in which an American court cited a slave case as precedent, and the courts still doing it.
Ida B. Wells, 1893, in The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.
The primary account of the lease, written while it ran.
Frederick Douglass, 1888.
Twenty-three years after the Amendment. The first reading of the exception by the man who saw it coming.
Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli, and Aiyuba Thomas. OR Books.
The book on the movement, from inside it.
The treatise and the instrument.
The White Pages on the Legality of Slavery and Involuntary Servitude in the United States of America names the claim. The Constitutional Abolition Enforcement Standards measure it. Both are the work of Dennis Febo, licensed to the network. To request the record for your jurisdiction, write to info@abolishslavery.us.
Court opinions, statutes, and treaty texts are public domain. Slip opinions are the courts' own PDFs from the public docket. Older reported cases and the 1845 and 1848 Post opinions are browser prints of the CourtListener or Caselaw Access Project text and carry the official page numbers in the text. Where a copy and the official reporter differ, the reporter controls.