Replication Data for: The Law of Heredity--Whistelo, Whiteness and Whales

This Article reveals the impact of an early New York case upon science and law, raising questions about heredity that spurred evidentiary progress from visual resemblance, through blood groups, to DNA paternity testing. In the Jeffersonian republic, a dark-skinned man was charged with reputedly fathering the infant daughter of a mixed-race woman. However, to most witnesses this light-skinned child appeared to be the offspring of a White man. The trial of Commissioners of the Alms-House, vs Alexander Whistelo, a Black man, being a Remarkable Case of Bastardy (1808) became a cause célèbre in both law and medicine for its forensic debate on proving paternity long before modern discoveries. This famous courtroom drama raised puzzling questions about the inheritance of asserted racial characteristics. Over a dozen leading physicians offered their expert medical testimony. A decade later the same protagonists resumed their struggles over taxonomies in science and law in another epic conflict, Is a Whale a Fish? An Accurate Report of the Case of James Maurice against Samuel Judd (1818). Long overlooked in law review literature, these early cases jointly open a startling window displaying the complex influences of law upon the course of scientific inquiry. This Article argues that one enduring legacy of the Whistelo trial was the admission of exclusionary blood group testing to disprove paternity more than a century later. Furthermore, such challenging legal conflicts over parentage and heredity guided scientific researchers towards the discovery of the human genome by the late twentieth century. With DNA-based paternity testing now conclusive and ubiquitous, humankind owes a substantial debt to the illegitimate infant whose parentage was tried in the Whistelo case. “The wisely curious rack their brain, To solve this problem—all in vain!” William Sampson