Lord Mansfield

William Murray was born on 2 March 1705 at Scone Palace in Perthshire, Scotland, a younger son of Viscount Stormont. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, and called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. A brilliant advocate, he became Solicitor General in 1742 and Attorney General in 1754. In 1756 he was appointed Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench and created Baron Mansfield; he served for more than thirty years. Mansfield modernized English commercial law, drawing on the customs of merchants and on Roman and international law to settle questions of contracts, insurance and bills of exchange. In 1772, in the case of James Somerset, an enslaved man who had escaped in London and been seized to be shipped to Jamaica, he ruled that no law of England allowed a master to force him abroad, and Somerset went free. In the Zong case of 1783 he ordered a new trial of an insurance claim for enslaved Africans thrown overboard. His great-niece Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an enslaved woman, was raised in his household. He died on 20 March 1793.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Granville Sharp · William Blackstone · William Wilberforce