Somerset’s Case at the Bar: Securing the “Pure Air” of English Jurisdiction Within the British Empire

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.