Somerset v Stewart

Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 (also known as Sommersett v Steuart, Somersett's case, and the Mansfield Judgment) is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale. According to one reported version of the case, Lord Mansfield decided that:

The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.^[1]

Slavery had never been authorised by statute ("positive law") within England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield found it also to be unsupported within England by the common law, although he made no comment on the position in the overseas territories of the British Empire. The case was closely followed throughout the Empire, particularly in the thirteen American colonies.^[2] Scholars have disagreed over precisely what legal precedent the case set.