The Genuine Speech of Lord Mansfield, in Giving the Judgment of the Court of King's-Bench, on Monday, November 28, 1774, in the Cause of Campbell against Hall, Respecting the King's Letters Patents, of the 20th of July, 1774; for Raising a Duty of...
- William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This is a 29-page pamphlet from 1774 recording the courtroom speech of Lord Mansfield (William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield), the Lord Chief Justice of England, as he delivered the Court of King’s Bench judgment in the case of Campbell v. Hall. The case centered on the legality of letters patent issued by King George III in 1764 that imposed a 4.5% export duty on goods leaving the island of Grenada, a colony recently acquired from France. The speech was transcribed in shorthand by an anonymous barrister and published the same year, making it a rare firsthand record of one of the landmark constitutional cases touching on the limits of royal prerogative over conquered colonial territories.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.