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What attracted you to the story of Granville Sharp and the Somerset case?

I have spent the last 20 years as an animal-rights lawyer. In my process of trying to understand whether non-human animals should have basic legal rights and if so which ones, I began to ask, Why should humans have rights? When did humans get rights? Which are the most fundamental? What is it about being human that qualifies us for rights?

As I began to look into those questions, I kept running into the question of human slavery. Why is it that some humans enslaved others, so that instead of viewing them as legal persons with rights, they were viewed as "things" without any rights at all that existed for the benefit of legal persons. And then how did that change? How did legal things become legal persons? How did slaves become free? How did they get rights?

That kept leading me back to the Somerset case where, instead of having a civil war like we had in the United States to free the slaves, England managed to free the slaves through a single judicial decision. It's a lot better to have social change come about through judicial decisions or legislative change than through civil war. So I kept coming back to Somerset and I became engrossed in the details of the world of Granville Sharp, Lord Mansfield, and James Somerset.

Is the story of the Somerset case just a good tale? Or does it present us with a usable past that can help us deal with issues today?

Both. It's an interesting tale. The characters are eccentric, dedicated, intelligent, certainly immersed deeply into their own time.

Granville Sharp is a fervent believer in a particular sort of Christianity who indeed believes in the literal truth of the Bible. But he's fiercely anti-Catholic—doesn't even classify Catholics as Christians. Lord Mansfield is probably the most capable, qualified judge ever spoken, extremely fair. Although he was a man of his time and had his own weaknesses and strengths.

The Somerset case is the tale of the conflict between these two men. Granville Sharp, determined that slavery was wrong and that Lord Mansfield was going to be the instrument by which it was abolished. And Lord Mansfield also believing that slavery was probably wrong, understood in a way that Granville Sharp did not understand that abolishing slavery could have very severe economic and social consequences for Great Britain.

And then, there's the fact that a black man, a slave, a thing, was able to use the judicial process to pass from being a thing to a person. The way his lawyers, others, and judges used the writ of habeas corpus has many lessons for us today. In fact I was not surprised that last June when the United States Supreme Court handed down its series of path breaking habeas corpus cases around the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that they cited Somerset.

And certainly it's one lesson that I intend to draw in my work on behalf of non-human animals.

You mentioned the religious commitment of Granville Sharp. He was associated in the Antislavery Society with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect and other evangelically-minded social reformers. To what degree did his religious commitment make it possible for him to persevere through four different cases?

Sharp's religious commitment was the motivating force behind his anti-slavery work. He was very moralistic in the best sense. He saw something that he thought was against God's will, was morally wrong, and which he felt was such an abomination that really stained the reputation of the country he loved. And once he decided to stop it, I think his religious fervor and his faith motivated him to keep going and bring case after case.

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4