Steven Spielberg’s film made people aware of one slave-trading case,

that of the Amistad.

The facts of the case are essentially this: in 1839, Portuguese slave
hunters captured a group of Africans and sent them to Cuba, where
they were bought by two Spanish planters who put them aboard
the Amistad and set sail for their plantations in the Caribbean. The
Africans killed the captain and cook and demanded that the planters
sail to Africa. The Amistad was seized off New York; the planters were
set free, and the Africans were initially charged with murder. The
murder charges were dismissed, but the Africans remained in custody
as the two planters, the Spanish government, and even the captain of
the ship that brought the passengers of the Amistad to land tried to
claim them. The case was further complicated by the Van Buren
administration’s attempts to influence the judicial branch. Abolitionists
rallied around the Africans’ cause.
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that the
Africans had been kidnapped and illegally sold as slaves; those who
survived were returned to Africa. The collection contains the arguments
of two lawyers for the Africans, Roger Baldwin and John Quincy
Adams.

As you read these arguments and learn more about the case, keep in
mind that, as historian Eric Foner has pointed
out(http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/74/), “Rather than being receptive
to abolitionist sentiment, the courts were among the main defenders of
slavery.” Because this case dealt with the international slave trade, its
ruling had no impact on the status of slaves in the United States.