Everyone knows that legal literature uses an idiosyncratic system of citations for authorities and sources. A group of law schools' law reviews, including my Texas Law Review at my alma mater, the University of Texas School of Law, jointly put out the so-called Bluebook as a citation guide with complex rules, and examples, about the proper "form" for citing legal and other sources in all types of legal literature and documents.
Here is a bit of progress: the Bluebook has just issued a new edition in which it directs that for case decisions involving an enslaved person (either as party or as the subject of a legal dispute), lawyers and legal scholars are to add to the citation "(enslaved person)."
Attached is the announcement, on which I have underlined the exact change which I wholeheartedly endorse. Enslaved African Americans were deprived of their voices and the ability to create records of themselves and their lives, except in highly circumscribed and usually difficult-to-discover ways; so bringing to the attention of today's lawyers, legal scholars, and judges the existence of an enslaved person in a legal dispute that gave rise to an appellate decision (generally antebellum trial court decisions were not "reported" or printed so as to be citable) is a good step forward. There is of course more to be done.
