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Wilberforce was a younger protégé of Sharp's and was extremely awed by Sharp.He believed Sharp was the first abolitionist. You had a number of the people like Wilberforce who would always view him as the first abolitionist. He wasn't the first person, obviously, throughout history to believe that slavery was odious and wrong. But he was really the first person who said, "It's wrong, and it's going to be stopped; I have a plan and a strategy; and I intend to spend my whole life doing it if I have to."

There are a lot of parallels between the kind of work Sharp was doing and the public interest law firms that we know today, such as the ACLU and its conservative counterparts. Does public interest law have its roots in this kind of activism?

I suspect it does. Granville Sharp was not even a lawyer. He was a lowly ordnance clerk who labored away in the Tower of London. In fact, he would write to some of his friends in the U.S. and say that he was kind of a slave, chained to a job to support himself. He spent hours and hours a day, six days a week for many years. He did not operate at the high social levels, didn't have access to the decision makers the way a prominent lawyer might.

But he decided, just as a private citizen, that he was going to right a wrong. And everyone from then on owes some kind of a nod to him because he was not doing it as part of a profession and not doing it because he was being paid to do it. His personal beliefs motivated his legal work.

At points in reading your account, Lord Mansfield seemed like somebody engaging in judicial activism. At other points he sounded very conservative and concerned with maintaining the status quo. How do you read Mansfield?

Mansfield was, indeed, a deeply conservative judge. Conservative values can involve trying to maintain some of the most deeply held values and principles that someone believes in.

The most important part of Lord Mansfield's decision was his determination that slavery was odious, that it was immoral. And it was so immoral that the common law, which should really track morality, would not support slavery.

Common law judges can be categorized in three major ways: one kind might be deeply conservative in that he or she will look back to see what other judges have written and try to follow that. But there's an immense amount of room for having two judges who feel that way coming with diametrically opposite opinions.

Then you have judges who think that the past does not necessarily need to control the present, but that what's really important is that a judge do what is right. I call them principled judges. Lord Mansfield ultimately did what he thought was right.

And then there are policy judges. They are not interested as much in doing what is right as in doing what is good for society. The slave interests, indeed, were pressuring Lord Mansfield to do not what was right, but to do what was good. They were reminding him what the economic value of each slave was, how deeply Great Britain was committed to the slave trade, what an economic catastrophe it could be if he abolished slavery, and how that would cripple and potentially devastate England's economy.

So they wanted him to do what was good for the country and Granville Sharp wanted to do what was right. Mansfield wanted the parties to settle, but they wanted a test case. So in exasperation he finally said, Well then, if you're not going to settle, let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4