The Royal Courts of England in 1789 By Professor JAMES OLDHAM Georgetown University LawCenter, Washington, D.C. 1. The Royal Courts of England in 1789 — an Introduction It is a pleasure to participate in the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Sweden. My contribution will be a comparative one — to indicate the structure and characteristics of the royal courts of England as they were situated in the year 1789. The perspective that I bring to this subject grows out of the study that I have conducted for a number of years of the career of the first Earl of Mansfield, who was Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench of England from 1756 until 1788. Lord Mansfield was a powerful judicial figure of international stature, both during his time and since. Known widely as “the Father of English Commercial Law”, Mansfield was the driving force behind the forging of coherent principles pertaining to insurance, negotiable instruments, and prize law. He also prepared the way for later developments in the law of contract and quasi-contract. Mansfield was, moreover, famous for his contribution to the eventual elimination of slavery in England, as signified in his decision in the Somerset case.* Also, he was outspoken in his support of religious toleration, which played a part in the personal misfortune that befell him in 1780 when his house in Bloomsbury Square was burned to the ground in the anti-Catholic frenzy of the Gordon Riots.^ On the political side, Mansfield fell into unpopularity because of his staunch support for George III and his opposition to the American Revolution. Mansfield’s strong royalist loyalty contributed to his preference for giving narrow scope to freedom of the press and correspondingly broad scope to legal actions for seditious libel. Luckily for modern legal historians, over half of the personal notes kept by Lord Mansfield as a sitting trial judge survived the Gordon Riots. These trial notes were discovered in the late 1960’s, and they have been the chief source of my study of Mansfield’s career.^ In the process, I have learned much about the operative characteristics of the English court systemin the late 18th century. ' Ex Parte Somerset, Lofft i (1772). See J. Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery”, 27 Journal of British Studies 45, 1988. ^ See generally Charles Dickens’ novel, Barnaby Rudqe. ^ With the cooperation of the current (Eighth) Earl of Mansfield, I have been preparing for some
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