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Feb 7, 2022 · Sentencing Mansfield Jnr at the non-jury court on Monday, presiding judge Mr Justice Alexander Owens said that the defendant had decided to suppress the “potential evidence” of his...
Mansfield tried various ways to avoid hearing the case. Initially, he tried to persuade Steuart to free Somerset, as had happened on similar occasions, but Steuart refused. The West Indian planters who financed the defence also refused all offers to settle out of court.
Sep 2, 2023 · Mansfield wished to avoid a “comprehensive judgement” on slavery. He decided, however, that “English law did not allow a master residing in England to deport someone on the grounds that he was legally a slave in some other region.”
Jan 4, 2022 · In deciding the case of Somersett versus Stuart (1772), the King’s Court Bench ruled in what is now known as the Mansfield Decision that there was no such thing as a slave on English soil. This decision panicked colonial American slaveholders, whose prosperity was generated by human bondage.
- Barbara Alice Mann
- Barbara.mann@utoledo.edu
In 1785, Lord Mansfield expressed the view in R v Inhabitants of Thames Ditton that his ruling in the Somerset case decided only that a slave could not be forcibly removed from England against his will.
The Mansfield judgment opened the first chapter in the heroic struggle for slave emancipation. It was all the more significant in that it gave slaves the status of human beings in England.
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Jun 22, 2018 · By first establishing the ambiguity of the legal context and the multifarious political pressures that preceded Somerset’s case, this article identifies the extent of Lord Mansfield’s ‘room for manoeuvre’ with respect to three elements of his conduct: the delay and reluctance in making a decision, the choices regarding the substantive ...
