Norman Poser's Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013) was reviewed recently in the Wall Street Journal. Mansfield is best known among legal historians as the author of Somerset's case, which freed a slave who was brought to Great Britain by his owner. Cribbing now from the review:
Mansfield was, of course, morally right to free Somerset. Whether he was legally correct, according to the contradictory common-law precedents, was less clear. Then, as now, the law proved a powerful but insufficient arbiter of ethical and political disagreement. This paradox is implicit throughout Norman Poser's engaging biography, Lord Mansfield : Justice in the Age of Reason. The greatest jurist of his time, Mansfield loved the common law and studied it with diligence. But facing the conflicts of a rapidly modernizing society, he often adapted, rather than applied, the law bequeathed to him.
The question of the lawfulness of Mansfield opinion is an issue that my antebellum southern subjects took up often. Unsurprisingly they weren't happy with him at all. But the debate raised important questions about the meaning of law, reason, and sentiment. About this I hope to have a lot more to say soon.
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