This chapter explores the judicial forum as a political space relatively free from censorship in which some lawyers and litigants scrutinized aspects of the social order under Spanish rule. Some expressed their dislike of slavery and their aspirations for change. The chapter looks at litigation and intellectual culture in Popayán, where the lawyer Félix José de Restrepo asserted that slaves were people with dignity who deserved judicial compassion. The government, he argued, should facilitate slave emancipation, a trademark of prudent legislation. The former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen even argued that all vassals of the king, rich and poor alike, deserved equal protection from the magistrates. With a political crisis shattering the viceroyalty in 1810, political revolution had new implications for these positions. Some patricians who sympathized with independence now criticized the viceroyalty’s “pact” with Spain as "slavery." Pushing the boundaries of this metaphor, some slaves in Popayán saw their own freedom as a necessary extension of the freedom from Spain demanded by their masters. A few patricians now began to discuss a formal plan to reform slavery through legislation.