"To place these laws in historical context for modern-day usage and encourage judges and lawyers to address slavery’s influence on the law, I started the Citing Slavery Project in 2020. Since then, my team of students and I have identified more than 12,000 cases involving enslaved people and more than 40,000 cases that cite those cases."

https://www.citingslavery.org

Old laws that affect people’s rights need to be eliminated.

Edited to add: State legislatures need to do this, too. Sodomy laws are still on the books in many states, especially in red states, and the minute the SC overturns LGBTQ+ rights those laws will be active again and anti-gay forces will be demanding police raids on private homes again.

when new of the emancipation proclamation reached the hinterlands of the defunct Confederacy, Galveston when the Union Army finally got to TX. (After that the news still took a week or more to spread throughout Texas, and I've been told that in some bergs the slave-owning townsfolk tried to prevent the spread of the news.)

The EP was a presidential order issued by the Union's commander in chief and applied only to states in rebellion against the US because that's all it could apply to. It wasn't a law. It was an executive order. It didn't even apply to Native American tribes that assisted the Confederacy.

Slavery was outlawed by legislation in some states *after* the EP was issued but before it was banned by the 13th Amendment. But in some non-rebellious states slavery wasn't ever outlawed by state action. In Delaware, for example, slaves could be owned until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 12/1895, although the source I checked said that they probably only numbered "in the hundreds." (Well, then. ) New Jersey claimed to have abolished slavery by relabeling slaves as "apprentices for life" (a distinction that the 1860 census ignored, calling them what they were in fact if not law). Then the 13th Amendment was ratified, apparently there were 16 such people freed from their life-time "apprenticeships".

The abolition of slavery in the territory wedged between Mexico and Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was a process that started with some states in 1777 and concluded by Constitutional amendment in 12/1875. Even then, some tribes continued to hold slaves (probably not many) until the practice was ended by treaty in 1866.