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Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 (also known as Sommersett v Steuart, Somersett's case, and the Mansfield Judgment) is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale.
This list of cases involving Lord Mansfield includes his major reported legal judgments, particularly during the time that Lord Mansfield served as the Lord Chief Justice of the English Court of the King's Bench from 1756 to 1788.
Murray was born on 2 March 1705, at Scone Palace in Perthshire, Scotland, the fourth son of the 5th Viscount of Stormont and his wife Margaret [5] as one of eleven children. [6] [7] Both his parents were strong supporters of the Jacobite cause, [8] [9] and his older brother James followed "The Old Pretender" into exile, this left the family's finance relatively impoverished. [10]
Lord Mansfield's opinion in the case was widely read and commented on in the colonies. Slavery, Lord Mansfield ruled, had no basis in "natural law" and could only be maintained through "positive law". As slavery had never been enacted by English law, it did not legally exist in England and no person on English soil could be held in bondage.
Lord Mansfield was the pre-eminent judge of his age, and decided a host of seminal cases, many of which laid the foundations for commercial law and remain good law to this day. Pages in category "Lord Mansfield cases"
[1] [2] Dido was the great niece of Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield who made notable rulings limiting the practice of slavery and the slave trade, notably Somersett's Case and the Zong trial. The 2013 film Belle drew inspiration from the painting. [3] It was once attributed to the German-born artist Johan Zoffany.
Lord Mansfield subsequently commented upon his decision in the Somersett case in R v Inhabitants of Thames Ditton (1785) [20] The official report notes that Mansfield expressed the view during counsel's argument that his ruling in the Somerset case decided only that a slave could not be forcibly removed from England against his will: "The ...
Mansfield tried to persuade Stewart to free Somerset, as had happened in several similar recent incidents, thereby avoiding a potentially controversial legal case that might challenge the entire legality of slavery. Stewart refused, and his case was financed by planters in the West Indies who wanted to force a ruling that they believed would ...