Beyond Somerset?: Slavery and the Temporality of Law
Keywords:
Somerset’s Case (1772) Slavery and law English legal history Precedent Temporality of lawAbstract
This article revisits the legal-historical significance of Somerset’s Case (1772) by engaging with Holly Brewer’s argument about the temporality of slavery law in the British Empire. Whereas earlier historians interpreted Somerset as a clarification of English law’s previously uncertain stance toward slavery, Brewer contends that English legal institutions had already played an active role in producing and legitimizing slavery during the late seventeenth century. In particular, she identifies cases such as Butts v. Penny (1677) as precedents through which the English crown and courts helped construct a legal framework that recognized enslaved persons as property. From this perspective, Somerset should be understood not as the resolution of legal ambiguity but as a reversal of an established trajectory in English legal thought. By examining how historians and historical actors have interpreted these precedents, the article highlights the importance of temporality, precedent, and historical interpretation in shaping the legal history of slavery. The history of slavery law thus emerges as a field defined by contested understandings of the past and by debates over which legal precedents should govern the present.
References
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Van Cleve, George, “Somerset's Case and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective,” Law and History Review 24 (2006): 605–7Google Scholar.
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Ibid., 636.
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Webb, Derek A., “The Somerset Effect: Parsing Lord Mansfield's Words on Slavery in Nineteenth Century America,” Law and History Review 32 (2014): 455–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Patricia Hagler Minter, “‘The State of Slavery’: Somerset, The Slave, Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Slavery & Abolition 36 (2015): 603–17.
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Eliga H. Gould, “The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 60 (2003): 504–5. See also Mason, Matthew, “North American Calm, West Indian Storm: the Politics of the Somerset Decision in the British Atlantic,” Slavery & Abolition 41 (2020): 723–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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Ibid., 829.
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Van Cleve, “Somerset's Case,” 611.
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Ibid., 615.
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Ibid., 604.
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Ruth Paley made an analogous point in her comment on Van Cleve's article, noting the difficulty of defining “just what this ‘near slavery’ was and how it could be distinguished from actual slavery.” See Paley, , “Imperial Politics and English Law: The Many Contexts of Somerset,” Law and History Review 24 (2006): 661CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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Brewer, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery,” 792.
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Ibid., 793–94.
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Ibid., 830.
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Forbes v. Cochrane, published in James Dowling and Archer Ryland, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in The Court of King's Bench, iii (London: S. Brooke, 1824), 688–89.
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Brewer, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery,” 829.
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Ibid., 832.
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