Andrew T. Fede ’78 Considers History, Equality and Roads Not Taken

Andrew T. Fede ’78 enrolled at Montclair to study history, with plans to teach social studies. “My guidance counselors pointed me to Montclair,” he recalls. “I liked that it was close to home – I could commute to class – and that it was affordable.”

Like so many Montclair students, Fede combined part-time work with his coursework. His spare time was devoted to playing drums in local bands. As graduation grew closer, however, Fede became concerned about the job market for teachers which, at the time, was challenging. “My Montclair advisor saw that my grades were good and suggested I consider law school,” he says. “I had taken a course in political science and liked it. It seemed like a path worth investigating.”

Fede sat for the LSAT the summer after graduation, and a year later began his studies at Rutgers Law School. He spent the first 23 years of his law career with the firm that became Contant, Atkins & Fede, LLC and the next five at Herten, Burstein, Sheridan, Cevasco, Bottinelli, Litt & Harz, LLC, which has since merged with Archer & Greiner, PC, specializing in civil and commercial litigation, municipal and zoning law, tax appeals, employment law, and more.

At Archer, Fede currently is Of Counsel. He has argued five times before New Jersey’s Supreme Court and many times before the New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division. He has represented municipalities, planning and zoning boards, and public library boards; and he has served as a New Jersey Superior Court-appointed special master, mediator, arbitrator, and condemnation commissioner.

Fede has fulfilled his original dream of teaching as well. Since 1986, he has been an adjunct professor at Montclair, now with the Department of Political Science and Law. “I happened upon an ad in the New Jersey Law Journal,” he says. “Montclair was looking for people to teach in the paralegal studies program. I have been teaching there ever since.”

In addition, Fede has successfully merged his expertise in law, his desire to educate others, and his love of history through the publication of numerous articles and books exploring the intersection of law, slavery, and race-based inequality in the United States. His newest title, A Degraded Caste of Society: Unequal Protection of the Law as a Badge of Slavery, is scheduled for release by the University of Georgia Press this October.

A Degraded Caste of Society continues Fede’s interest in how written law impacts equitable treatment. He authored People Without Rights: An Interpretation of the Fundamentals of the Law of Slavery in the U.S. South, published in 1992 and republished in 2011 by Routledge; Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South, Quid Pro, 2011; and Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World, University of Georgia Press, 2017.

Fede traces his passion for this topic to a course he took in law school on law and social change in U.S. history. “It was a seminar-type course that required a paper on your topic of choice,” he explains. “I decided to look into enslavement law. That paper became two published articles and has been worked into many projects since.”

The books form a series, with the first an overview of enslavement law, the second focusing on manumission, and the third comparing homicide law involving enslaved people in the United States with other slave societies. In his fourth book, Fede explains “In the South, criminal law became race-based, either criminalizing what was called Black insolence or endorsing white violence as a legal response to what individual whites deemed to be insolence.” Fede says, “I draw on case law and statutes, as well as census data and newspaper articles.”

In A Degraded Caste of Society, Fede begins, in Chapter 1, with what he calls “roads not taken.”

“For example, in Illinois in the 1850s, a free Black man charged with murder won a new trial on appeal, successfully using the argument that he should be treated the same as a white person,” Fede says. “At that time, common law didn’t recognize race at all. History shows that there were people advocating for equality even before the Civil War. Legislators and judges in the South, in comparison, went to great lengths to create an entire body of law based on race. During the Jim Crow era, the law evolved to guarantee white supremacy.”

Fede also points out how centuries-old legislation can impact current cases. “Although three men were convicted of the racially motivated murder in 2020 of Ahmaud Arbery, the case initially was not prosecuted because of a Georgia law from the 1860s – still on the books – that allowed for citizen’s arrests of ‘insolent free Blacks.’ The law was repealed after this case.”

Fede’s other publications include “Slave Codes,” which is included in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1998); eleven articles and book reviews in the American Journal of Legal History, Law and History Review, American Historical Review, Cardozo Law Review, Journal of Supreme Court History, FCH Annals: Journal of the Florida Conference of Historians, and Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. He wrote biographical sketches of James B. Dill for The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (2009) and Andrew Kirkpatrick and Dill for American National Biography (1999). Fede’s articles have also appeared in the New Jersey Law Journal, New Jersey Lawyer, New Jersey Lawyer Magazine, New Jersey Municipalities Magazine, Municipal Law Review, and New Jersey Labor & Employment Law Quarterly.

Fede is already contemplating his next writing project. “There is always an idea or two that doesn’t quite fit into a current project, that I want to return to later,” he says. “Right now, I’m considering trends in case and statute law in Texas, as well as a case in South Carolina.”

He also plans to continue teaching at Montclair. “I have had the opportunity to see the University grow and change over time,” he says, adding, “I let my students know that I am a Montclair graduate. I hope it encourages them to work through adversity and indecision, and to know that they have what it takes be successful.”