Somerset v Stewart

Somerset v Stewart was an English Court of King's Bench decision of 1772, given by Lord Mansfield, holding that a slave owner could not forcibly remove an enslaved man, James Somerset, from England to be sold into slavery in Jamaica, because chattel slavery was not supported by the positive law of England and could be established only by legislation, which had never been enacted for England itself. It was widely, and at the time somewhat too broadly, understood as holding that slavery could not exist on English soil, and it became a foundational precedent invoked by abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades that followed.