Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Texas Wesleyan Law Review
Abstract
How do we measure the importance of Somerset's Case-or any single legal decision? The answer will depend on why we ask the question. Thirty years ago in an important article, William Wiecek showed how American abolitionists embraced Somerset, and papers throughout this conference have demonstrated that the case reverberated throughout the United States for almost a century after Lord Mansfield uttered his cryptic opinion in Westminster Hall in 1772. Mansfield did not say anything about England's air quality, but James Somerset's counsel did exclaim that England's air was too pure for a slave to breathe. This line was at least two centuries old, dating back to a hazily recorded case involving a Russian master who whipped his serf in England in the 1560s. Because England had too pure an air for a slave to breathe, the master could not beat his serf. The line was revived at the outset of the English Civil War, when the House of Commons impeached the judges of Star Chamber for whipping and imprisoning John Lilburne for having published unlicensed books on Puritanism. In fact, these civil war debates constitute the first written reference to the Russian slave's case. The inference was that Star Chamber had treated Lilburne like a slave. Parliament soon abolished the court, which was a subcommittee of the King's Privy Council. By the time Somerset's lawyers made their appearance at the bar of King's Bench in 1772, English schoolboys had for a long time been taught, among other lessons of Whig history-or English history as the story of the progress of freedom-that their kingdom had too pure an air for a slave to breathe. This essay explores what this environmental conceit meant as a legal fact to the legal professionals involved in the case in 1772. It was important to them. Many of us are also legal professionals, and the case remains important to us. But the case meant something different for them, who could not see the future, than it does today for us, who see their future as our history. It is a mistake, then, to attribute too much weight to this one legal decision-to read into Mansfield's opinion the whole history of liberation.
First Page
699
DOI
https://doi.org/10.37419/TWLR.V13.I2.17
Volume
13
Publication Date
2007
Recommended Citation
Hulsebosch, Daniel J., "Somerset’s Case at the Bar: Securing the "Pure Air" of English Jurisdiction Within the British Empire" (2007). Faculty Articles. 614.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-articles/614
