Many northern states enacted legislation to protect free black Americans (who could otherwise be abducted, brought before court without the ability to produce a defense, and then lawfully enslaved) as well as runaway slaves. Those laws came to be known as personal liberty laws and required slave owners and fugitive hunters to produce evidence that their captures were truly fugitive slaves, "just as southern states demanded the right to retrieve runaway slaves, northern states demanded the right to protect their free black residents from being kidnapped and sold into servitude in the south" (Finkelman 399).