Professor Etienne Toussaint | Constitutional Right to Be Free From Food Insecurity

Legal Tenzer: Casual Conversations on Noteworthy Legal Topics

In this episode, I speak with Professor Etienne Toussaint about his article, The Abolition of Food Suppression. The 13th Amendment is best known for abolishing slavery and indentured servitude. However, it also gives Congress the authority to pass laws that further systems connected to slavery. On this episode, Professor Ettiene Toussaint discusses his thoughtful argument on how to invoke the 13th Amendment to resolve issues of food insecurity among historically marginalized communities, He notes that the antebellum system of chattel slavery invokes the legislative potential of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Enforcement Clause. During this discussion, Professor Toussaint identifies key dignitary harms like the right to liberty, the right to equality, and the right to integrity and we take an interesting digression into the history of black farmers and their plight today.
About our guest:
Professor Etienne C. Toussaint is an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where he teaches contract law, business law, community economic development, philosophical, legal ethics, legal education, and professional responsibility.

His scholarship sits at the intersection of law, history, culture, and political economy, with a focus on the socioeconomic challenges facing urban communities across the United States. For example, he has written about the ethical implications of social impact investing, the role of the solidarity economy in equitable community development, the challenges facing urban farming programs designed to address food insecurity, the plight of Black farmers suffering racial discrimination from the USDA, and the pedagogical principles of public citizenship lawyering. He has delivered over 100 presentations on these topics and others at faculty colloquia, legal conferences, community workshops, and across various media platforms.

Professor Toussaint has been nationally recognized for his teaching, scholarship, and service. In 2023, he was awarded both a Faculty Scholarship Award and a Faculty Diversity Leadership Award by the University of South Carolina School of Law. In 2022, he was awarded the Junior Great Teacher Award by the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). In 2021 he was honored as the Stegner Center Young Scholar by the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment at The University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law. In recent years, his scholarship has been competitively selected for presentation at the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum; the Georgetown University Law Center’s Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Workshop; and The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop. His book chapters, articles, and essays have been published by the American Bar Association, Cambridge University Press, the California Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, and the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, among other print and online publications.

Prior to joining the law faculty at the University of South Carolina, Professor Toussaint taught Contracts, Business Organizations, and a Law & Economy seminar at the University of the District of Columbia, David A. Clarke School of Law, where he was awarded the 2018 Outstanding Neophyte Law Professor Award. He also taught housing finance and transactional lawyering as Co-Director of the Community&