REVIEWS

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1975.tb01412.x
Date01 March 1975
Published date01 March 1975
REVIEWS
BLACK SLAVES
IN
BRITAIN.
By
F.
0.
SHYLLON. [Oxford Univeristy
EVERY practising lawyer knows him and dreads him-the layman with
a
little
legal knowledge and
a
vast commitment to justice, who refuses to accept the
advice
of
eminent counsel, who insists against all legal opinion on going to
court, and who wins. Such
a
man was Granville Sharp,
a
minor civil servant
whose indignation at the violence meted out to some of the fifteen thousand
black slaves held in Britain in the late eighteenth century, led him to challenge
the conservatism of the English Bar and the equivocation of the English
Bench, and to precipitate a reluctant Lord Mansfield into uttering a judgment
which was to earn lasting
glory
for himself and the English judiciary. In this
spirited and well-researched account of the treatment of slavery by British
courts in the
60
years preceding abolition,
F.
0.
Shyllon demonstrates that Lord
Mansfield’s share of that fame is largely undeserved, and that although for
commendable propaganda purposes much use was made of his judgment, in
reality it did not even achieve the limited objective of halting the kidnapping
of black servants in the streets of London for shipping
off
to the West Indies.
Lord Mansfield was himself the owner of a slave, whom he treated as
a
member
of
the family (which she was, her mother having been captured and
impregnated by Lord Mansfield’s cousin) and whom he manumitted by will.
Only the most tenacious litigation and pamphleteering by Granville Sharp
compelled him
to
declare that the slave Sommersett should
go
free. His view
was that masters should think slaves free, and slaves think them not,
so
that
each would be on their best behavbur. After the Sommersett case he and the
later English judges without demur enforced contracts of marine insurance
covering the loss of slave cargo at sea-in one extraordinary matter the issue
was whether or not the casting overbbard,
to
conserve water supplies, of more
than one hundred slaves constituted necessary jettison included in the risk.
Perhaps the most interesting
part
of this study
is
the setting out of the
arguments of the planters’ lobby, who claimed in effect that to release the
slaves would interfere with basic rights
of
property, rock the British economy
and put foreign competitors at an advantage.
F.
0.
Shyllon does not hide
his scorn for these pleaders, and the combination in his work of vigorous
poleniic and meticulous scholarship gives it
a
curious tension. The book reads
well and is packed with interesting detail; one suspects that the pungency
with which it criticises myth-making historians may have been as disconcerting
to the publishers as, in his day, Granville Sharp’s obduracy was to the London
Bar.
Press.
1974.
243
pp.
E4.50.1
ALWE
SACHS.
JUDICARE
:
PUBLIC
FUNDS, PRIVATE LAWYERS,
AND
POOR PEOPLE.
By
S.
J.
BRAKEL. [American Bar Foundation.
1974.
Cloth
$7.00,
Paper
$3.50.1
THIS
book sets out to compare judicare (legal services provided by private
practitioners to poorer people) and staffed law
offices
set up under the Office
of Economic Opportunity, War on Poverty programme, and
so
tries to deter-
mine
the most effective means of delivering civil legal services to the poor.”
The author makes it plain from the start that he was predisposed in favour
of judicare. Mr. Brake1 raises some very important issues: that of the role of
the private practitioner in legal services, the role of test case and law reform
work, how to compare judicare and staffed law offices, and how to provide
effective legal services in rural areas and to special groups
(e.g.
in this context
228

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