Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
Thursday, November 7th, 2013
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Brooklyn Law School
Subotnick Center, 11th Floor
View Map ›
Please join us for the launch of Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason at Brooklyn Law School’s Subotnick Center.
The following is an excerpt from Lord Mansfield.
William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, dominated the world of law in eighteenth- century Britain. Mansfield’s long life (1705–1793) covered almost the entire century, and for thirty-two of those years he served as chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench. Through the power of his intellect and the clarity of his writing, he changed the laws of England and the Commonwealth nations forever. When the American colonies gained their independence, many of Mansfield’s innovations became the law of the United States.
Mansfield’s life and work need to be seen in the context of the age he lived in. Eighteenth-century England was spent in the shadow of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which replaced a political system based on authority with one based on reason. The revolutionaries of 1688 rejected the absolute-monarchy model of Louis XIV of France, in favour of a new kind of state that reduced the power of the monarchy, fostered the growth of industry and commerce, and promoted a religiously tolerant society. The guiding light of this momentous change was the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, who espoused political freedom, religious toleration, and economic individualism. Mansfield was a child of the Revolution, and Locke’s teachings showed up repeatedly in his arguments as a lawyer and his rulings as a judge.
The political change brought about by the Revolution was accompanied by the birth of modern scientific method. In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had emphasized that by careful examination of the natural world, patterns would emerge from which general principles could be drawn. But it was the genius of Isaac Newton that laid the groundwork for the scientific and technological advances of eighteenth-century Britain. Newton brought to English science and philosophy an empiricism consisting of inquiry, observation, and experiment; and Newton’s followers applied his scientific method to politics and law. Mansfield, pragmatic and innovative, inherited these ideas. He favoured reason over tradition, experience over abstraction. In the world of law, he was the foremost representative of the Age of Reason.
Mansfield was the founder of modern commercial law. He enfolded into the ancient common law of England the customs and usages of the merchants and industrialists. But his influence affected almost every area of the law. Much of his thinking seems strikingly up-to-date today. For example, he saw that the influence of money on elections was a threat to democratic institutions, and he recognized that individuals had a right of privacy. To this day the courts of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom apply legal rules that he established more than two hundred years ago. The United States Supreme Court alone has cited Mansfield’s decisions more than 330 times, including cases in 2004 and 2008 ruling that a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay was protected by the writ of habeas corpus.
Like United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in the twentieth century, Mansfield believed that the courts should be engines of social change. He saw morality as the basis of all law, and his court the guardian of public morals. He was willing to supplement the reforms enacted by the legislature and, where he deemed it necessary, to make new law in order to achieve justice and protect the weak. But his attempts to temper the rigidity of the common law were not always popular with fellow judges, and some of his innovations were undone after he retired.
To learn more about Lord Mansfield, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.