Lord Mansfield (William Murray)
William Murray, Lord Mansfield, was Lord Chief Justice for thirty-two years and effectively created English commercial law. Born in Perth in 1705, he was the fourth son of a Scottish viscount with Jacobite connections, sent to Westminster School at thirteen — a journey he made on horseback — and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He became the outstanding advocate of his generation, entered parliament, and served as Solicitor and then Attorney General before being appointed Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1756. His central achievement was to absorb the customs of merchants into the common law. Before him, commercial disputes were decided unpredictably; Mansfield sat with special juries of City traders, learned their practice, and turned it into precedent — on bills of exchange, insurance, agency, partnership and quasi-contract. English commercial law dates substantially from his judgments. He is best known for Somerset's Case in 1772, in which James Somerset, an enslaved man brought to England and about to be shipped to Jamaica, sought habeas corpus. Mansfield tried hard to have the case settled, warned of the consequences, and finally held that slavery was so odious that nothing could support it but positive law, and that no such law existed in England. It did not abolish slavery in the colonies, and was widely understood at the time as freeing those held in England. He raised his great-niece Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an enslaved woman, in his household at Kenwood. His house was burned in the Gordon Riots of 1780, destroying his library. He died in 1793.
- Lived: 1705 CE – 1793 CE
- Nationality: Scottish
- Roles: jurist, judge
