Comment by lkrubner

You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". The Nazis could pass a law saying that the Holocaust was legal, but the rest of the world felt free to disregard that law, and put the Nazis on trial. Some laws are not legal, that is the whole entire point of the West's 2,400 year old liberal tradition. Likewise, some claims of ownership are not legal, and not binding. You can pay good money for a slave, but you still don't own the slave, because no law can make it legal to own another human being. And this was true for all of the thousands of years that slavery was legal: none of those laws were ever legitimate, and none of those ownership claims were ever legitimate.