Category: Slavery and Law

Slavery, continued

29th March 2023

This morning the Guardian apologised for the role its founders has in respect of the slave trade, but this apology was not perhaps as significant as the publication of the actual detail of that role.

Apologies are inherently gestures, but details can linger, and it is the provision of information that sometimes can shape public understanding more than any apology.

And the detail that should linger is (again) about just how “normal” the slave trade was to Great Britain as it emerged as a great commercial and industrial power.

I have written before – here and elsewhere – about how laws and lawyers facilitated slavery and the slave trade.

Business people – merchants, lawyers, bankers, insurers – thought little about the evils and misery of the slave trade as they went about their businesses: buying and selling, insuring and investing, gaining wealth and making profits.

To the extent anyone had scruples, they were allayed with (flimsy) devices such as the “Yorke-Talbot Opinion”.

But moving from legal London to Manchester and Liverpool, it is no great surprise that those connected with a northern newspaper at a time of the cotton industry also had connections with the slave trade and with slavery in the United States.

And there are more – many more – areas of our national life built on the back of slaves – and where those involved did not, at the time, think of slavery as objectionable or exceptional, but just as a routine if sad fact of life.

It is this quiet ongoing widespread acceptance of slavery by the many – rather than any loud support by a few – which is more subversive of our self-serving self-image as a liberal and tolerant nation.

Even after our own abolition of slavery and direct participation in the slave trade, our industry and commerce continued to prosper from slavery elsewhere.

And by the time that reliance in turn came to an end, many of our great cities and ports had taken on their familiar forms.

The skylines of many places are the monuments to the wealth derived ultimately from slavery.

And the more awareness and understanding of the detail of this widespread involvement in slavery and the profits of slavery, the better.

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When both lawyers and the law are to blame

4th March 2022

Over at the Financial Times I have a piece on the extent to which lawyers are to be blamed for the abuse of English law by oligarchs.

The article is, in turn, an elaboration of a post I did at this blog earlier this week – and it is a topic I have also tweeted about.

And one response has been to assume that my attempt to say that lawyers are not entirely to blame means that it is being suggested that lawyers are not at all to blame.

I have been careful to state – and explain – that lawyers are culpable, and that solicitors especially get to choose who they act for and in what way.

This is not good enough for some commenters – and I have been told that I am somehow making excuses.

But the problem is with any area of law that relates to dreadful things – oligarchs, torture, slavery, police brutality – there are both systems and individual agency.

This is an area this blog has explored before.

And the focus on either systems or individual agency does not give you a full understanding of how the law and lawyers can enable such bad things to happen.

It has not been pleasant getting the ire that some want to dump on lawyers generally – but until and unless we can see that problems can be both systemic and personal, we are unlikely to resolve those problems.

And just jeering at lawyers, while satisfying, can be a substitute for meaningful reform of bad law and bad legal practice.

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The Rule of Law and the Colston Four – and why a jury acquittal shows a legal system working and not being undermined

 

The Colston Four defendants have been acquitted by a jury.

Some are contending, like this former cabinet minister, that this acquittal ‘undermines the rule of law’.

That contention is incorrect.

An acquittal is as much an aspect of the rule of law as a conviction.

Criminal courts can acquit as well as convict – both can be the outcomes of the application of due process in a particular case.

The Colston Four were acquitted by a jury – and the defendants did not deny the essential facts.

It can be open to a jury to do this – and this informative Guardian article sets out many other examples.

A jury returning a verdict that they are entitled to return is an example of the law in action, and not of a legal process undermined.

This is not to say that juries are perfect – indeed, many of the greatest miscarriages of justice have come from jury verdicts.

Juries do not always get things right.

But the constitutional importance of juries is not so much for the decisions they make, but for the decisions they take away from others.

The State may arrest, charge and prosecute a person – but they cannot convict and punish a defendant pleading ‘not guilty’ to a serious offence without a jury trial.

The implication of the former cabinet minister’s view quoted above is that it should not be open to a jury to acquit a person prosecuted for a serious offence – but only to convict and punish.

But that is not the ‘rule of law’ – it is something darker and nastier instead.

Others are fretting that the verdict creates a ‘precedent’.

It, of course, does not create any legal precedent – no jury can bind another jury, and each jury should look at the case before them on its own evidence.

Nor does it create any practical precedent – or, at least, not one which has any more force than the many previous examples set out in the Guardian article.

The real upset is that a court heard the evidence and acquitted the defendants.

This is what juries sometimes do – and they can do this because they are outwith the control of the prosecuting State.

One half-expects that this weekend’s press will see ‘government sources’ urging ‘a crackdown’ on ‘perverse’ acquittals – with a proposal for ministers to have a ‘fast track’ on imposing convictions.

And this is not to put an idea into the heads of government ministers – the idea is no doubt already there.

One irony – if that is the correct word – is that this very government sought to use primary legislation to enable ministers to break the law.

That proposal – over which the Advocate General and the Treasury Solicitor resigned (and the recently knighted former Lord Chancellor did not) – did more to undermine the rule of law than any verdict of a Bristol jury.

And the current hyper-partisanship of modern politics means that if, say, a group of fox hunters were acquitted by some shire county jury, the same people who are jeering the Bristol jury would be cheering the shire county jury instead.

But juries are juries – they make mistakes, but they are independent of State prosecutors.

And the noise of government supporters unhappy with a jury decision is the sweet sound of a working constitution.

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Hard questions for liberal sensibilities – the play White Noise and its implications

10th October 2021

*Spoiler warning for the play White Noise*

In the play White Noise – currently showing at the Bridge Theatre in London – there is what the programme calls ‘an extreme proposition’.

This blogpost is about that ‘extreme proposition’ – and please only read on if you have seen the play or do not mind the key plot point being spoiled.

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*Spoiler warning for the play White Noise*

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In the play, set in America, the black male character, an artist, proposes to sell himself into temporary slavery to the white male character, a (supposedly) liberal professor.

The play then shows how that transaction affects all involved.

For the liberal professor, for example, slave ownership seems to come naturally, and he swiftly adapts to exercising the ‘rights’ of a slave owner.

Indeed, all four characters swiftly – and convincingly – adapt.

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Watching this play unfold prompted a number of thoughts and recollections.

One was this recent tweet:

The second was reading about the (in)famous Stanford prison experiments and the Milgram experiment where it it appears a number of individuals also adapted quickly to behaviours that were cruel.

The third was an insightful comment by the philosopher Richard Rorty about Nineteen Eighty-four: that the last third of the book makes sense if you see it as not about Winston Smith, but about O’Brien – from the perspective of the torturer, not the tortured.

The fourth was a comment I once heard attributed to another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, that the most difficult question to put to many British people was whether they would have collaborated with a Nazi occupation.

The fifth was to the valuable work of David Olusoga and others in highlighting how prevalent and routine slave ownership was in the United Kingdom until the 1830s:

And the last thought was about my recent posts on slavery and the lawyers – about how lawyers and other professionals and business people casually provided the infrastructure for the slave trade and widespread slave ownership:

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What the play shows is the ease with which notions of slave ownership – and attendant cruelty – can be revived in a contemporary setting.

One of the other characters – a white lawyer – does not prevent this transaction – and indeed her law firm provides a deed of transaction for the parties to sign.

Whether such a transaction would be void under the United States constitution or by reason of public policy is not tested.

For the parties, it is enough that the deed does provide for legal rights and obligations.

The solemn formal legal document says a thing, and so the parties regulate their conduct accordingly.

And, far from the transaction being voided by the law, the play suggests that the police are more respectful of the ‘slave’ – for he is now the property of a white person, and so under his protection.

The law adapts, the law recognises, the law provides.

And so one of the many disturbing points about this extraordinary play is – in addition to the effects on the characters – is the plausibility about how the law – both in terms of the law of property and policing – would let this happen.

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Back in August this blog had a post setting out other areas where the law and lawyers facilitated and facilitate a range of horrible situations.

We are always only a step or two away from the law being there to enable cruelty – indeed, there are many areas of human activity from interrogation and prisons to the treatment of animals – where dreadful things happen out of sight and out of mind, with the full protection of law.

Civil liberties and human rights and humane treatment are all fragile standards.

It is not only ‘other’ people who will clap and cheer at humans being systemically inhumane.

It is not only ‘other’ people who will just carry on with a shrug and without a care at humans being systemically inhumane.

For most of us it will only be noise.

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Slaves as merchandise: what the first reported English case law on slavery tells us – the Butts v Penny case of 1677

13th August 2021

This blog recently looked at the end of the Atlantic slave trade, with the last (known) surviving transatlantic slaves and what their lives told us about law.

The last (known) victim died as recently as 1940, that is within the lifetime of four sitting United States senators.

This blog now moves to the beginnings of how English law dealt with slavey, with the Butts v Penny case of 1677.

(This is the first of an intended series of posts, dealing with cases on slavery and the slave trade.)

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Before we look at the case, there are three points of context.

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First, and by way of background: there was (supposedly) by the 1600s no (formal) slavery in England.

There had been been something known as ‘villeinage’ – where villeins, like human garden gnomes, were in effect held to be property fixed to the land.

Villeins however had (limited) legal protections, and could not be bought and sold like mere chattels.

By the 1600s, however, villeinage had in substance ended.

But it was the nearest English law had, at that point, to the notion of slavery.

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Second: by the 1670s English merchants had been happily and deeply involved in the slave trade for over a hundred years.

The slave trader John Hawkins was trading in slaves as early as the 1560s.

So impressed were those at the time with this trade in slaves that when Hawkins was granted a coat of arms, on its crest there was ‘a demi Moor in his proper colour, bound and captive’.

The role of English merchants in the trade in slaves was thereby not something that those at the time were somehow ashamed of – it was something openly celebrated.

At the time, a coat of arms was among the most public statement about a thing a person could make.

‘a demi Moor in his proper colour, bound and captive’

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Third: by the 1670s the trade in slaves even had the official recognition of the English state.

As early as 1618, James I had supported the establishment of a ‘Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa’ and in 1663 a royal charter was granted to the Royal African Company.

So although the English courts had not yet grappled with the slave trade in its case law, and although it was a concept not (directly) known in English law, slavery and the slave trade was certainly something that was legally recognised and sanctioned.

For a court in 1677 to decide that there could not be a trade in slaves would go against both over a hundred years of actual mercantile practice and over fifty years of official support.

The odd thing, perhaps, was that it took so long for a dispute to reach the English courts to be reported.

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For completeness, mention should now be made of a 1569 case: Cartwright.

This is the case where (supposedly) it was held that ‘England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in’.

The problem is that this celebrated – and later much-quoted – case was that it was not reported (that is, recorded) at the time, and we only know about if from later mentions in the 1700s.

Like a lost Shakespeare poem that we know about only from quotation, we do not have the original.

And it not being reported at the time, it had no contemporary impact or wider significance – if a judge said those rousing words at all.

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So we come to the 1677 case of Butts v Penny.

Here we have two law reports.

The first is from a collection of cases reported by the judge Sir Creswell Levinz.

Unfortunately, the Dictionary of National Biography tells us, that is ‘some division of opinion among English judges as to Levinz’s merits as a reporter’.

His report is here – and it is one brief report among many others he reported:

The other report is not from a judge nor even from a practising lawyer, but from an endearingly obsessive non-practising barrister called Joseph Keble, who just turned up to court every day to report cases that ended up filling twenty volumes.

His report differs from that of Levinz – and is even shorter:

Again, for Keble this was just one report among many, many others.

Neither Levinz nor Keble emphasise their reports of this case, and if you scroll (or leaf) through their reports, the report is just reported like any other.

The fact that the case was about slaves did not strike either reporter as being especially noteworthy, and presumably it did not strike their contemporaries as being that noteworthy either.

The reports are not consistent – for example, one says 100 slaves and one says 10 (and a half?).

As Levinz may have been a/the judge in the case, and is anyway the more senior lawyer of the two, his report would normally be preferred – regardless of his mixed reputation.

What does this case tell us?

First: Butts (the plaintiff) had bought slaves, and that Penny (the defendant) had taken them.

Second: Butts was suing Penny on the basis of ‘trover‘ – which means that Butts was not demanding the physical return of the slaves but was suing for their cash equivalent.

This was thereby a commercial case – and trover cases were a commonplace of the time – but unlike most commercial cases (then as now) this had not settled and so had to be determined by a court.

Third: the value or other importance of the case was such that Penny instructed a lawyer, Thompson, to put the defence – on the law, rather than on the facts.

Fourth: the lawyer Thompson put the defence that there could not be property in people – Keble says the lawyer compared the situation with the then extinguished state of villeinage.

Had the court sided with Thompson’s submission on this then perhaps the history of the law of slavery would have taken a different direction.

But after a century of English slave trading and given the royal sanction for the slave trade, it would have been a robust court that would have made such a decision.

Fifth: the court deferred to mercantile practice – the custom of merchants.

In essence: because as a commercial fact slaves were bought and sold, then the court must accept that slaves could be bought and sold.

Slaves had fewer protections than villeins – indeed no legal protections at all.

Slaves – human beings – were ‘merchandise’.

And as merchandise, they could thereby be the subject of an action for trover.

Like any other property.

And sixth: the court made reference to the slaves being ‘infidels’ as if that somehow reinforced the decision made.

And so the plaintiff won.

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The striking thing about this case is, well, just how un-striking it was at the time.

A commercial case among hundreds of others, with the briefest (and inconsistent) law reports.

The court just nodded along with the custom of merchants.

And that was that.

No outcry, no obvious public attention.

The same matter-of-fact, bureaucratic mentality that was to be a feature of how the English courts generally dealt with the issue of slavery for the next hundred or so years.

The court did not even seem to regard itself as making new law or establishing any precedent – it was instead just applying existing commercial law to yet another form of property.

As if it was completely normal.

One can presume that before 1677, similar cases would have settled on the assumption that slaves were ‘of course’ merchandise and so could be subject to an action in trover.

Only this otherwise unknown Mr Penny went to the length of litigating the case to court, employing the lawyer Thompson to raise a legal (rather than evidential) defence, and then Mr Penny lost.

Butts v Penny is an unexceptional exceptional case.

Exceptional to us, as we see human beings casually reduced to ‘merchandise’.

Unexceptional to those at the time, other than Mr Penny getting his lawyer to make a spirited but futile defence.

And this was the first mark on the legal record of how English courts would practically deal with the slave trade.

As Hannah Arendt said in a different context, this is how banal an evil can be.

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The last surviving transatlantic slaves and what their lives tell us about the law

11th August 2021

As part of my research into slavery and the law, I want to ascertain the chronological parameters of the transatlantic slave trade.

At one end, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is the emergence of the trade in the days when the legal system(s) were very different to now – with rights of action and forms of property with which many modern lawyers would not now be familiar.

But what of at the end?

Of course, we all know that the trade had (supposedly) ended by the early to mid nineteenth century.

But in fact the last victims of the trade were alive until modern times.

The last (known) living victim did not die until 1940 – within the lifetime of four currently serving United Senators

And if one looks at the lives of the last three of those who are known to have survived, you get some interesting insights into the role of (relatively) recent law in respect of transatlantic slavery.

The survivors names were Oluale Kossola (also known as Cudjo Lewis), Redohsi, and Matilda McCrear – see here, here and here.

The ‘legal’ insights one gets are:

– how transactions were still being made in Africa, and how the supply of slaves was still organised so as to meet demand;

– how the traders deftly evaded justice – by procedural delays, as well as destroying evidence and hiding the human evidence – and also by jury verdicts;

– how survivors did not have the automatic benefit of American citizenship after emancipation because they were born abroad; and

– how one of the survivors even sought compensation (presumably in the 1920s or 1930s) but the claim was dismissed.

These examples touch on modern legal issues – the existence of illegal markets, criminal prohibition and its avoidance (both in substance and by gaming procedure and evidence), rights of citizenship, and rights to compensation.

The story of the transatlantic slave trade lasted some five hundred years.

The story goes from the legal days of actions in trover and assumpsit to the laws that exist today.

It was far more extensive both in scope and duration than many would realise.

In a way, the story of the slave trade is the story of modern commercial law.

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A short video that provides the fuller picture of the Atlantic slave trade

10th August 2021

One of the projects on which I am working is a history of the law of slavery in practice.

You may think that you know the broad outlines of the story of slavery – at least in respect of the Atlantic slave trade.

But this short video – for which both script and animation are first-rate – is instructive and revealing, and it should be watched by anyone trying to understand the lasting effects of that trade on the world today.

The video looks at slavery from an African perspective – and emphasises two things that are sometimes missed.

First, how the European slave traders themselves created the demand for the selling of slaves – so that, for example, the capturing of prisoners within Africa for selling on to traders went from being a by-product of wars in Africa to the purpose of the wars.

Demand created its own supply.

Second, how the end of the slave trade meant that African kingdoms that had been dependent on that trade were then so weak for the period following the abolition of the trade and then slavery itself:

‘When the slave trade was finally outlawed in the Americas and Europe, the African kingdoms whose economies it had come to dominate collapsed, leaving them open to conquest and colonisation.’

And so this how the scramble for Africa in the late-1800s resulted from the slave trade that ended in the early- to mid-1800s.

This is an obvious consequence, if you think about it, and joins together slavery and (formal) colonisation as two linked stages of the same exercise of exploitation.

Africa was first made poor, and then it was taken – with the exploitation becoming also of minerals and resources, as well as of labour.

Had it not been for the earlier slave trade, the story of subsequent European imperialism in Africa may have been significantly different.

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One of the curses of an Anglocentric or Eurocentric perspective is that so much of the fuller picture is hidden – or just not looked for.

And this video – and the fuller picture which it shows of markets being created and then cleared – is useful context for the question which I am seeking to address in my research project: how did the legal system and lawyers facilitate slavery?

Slavery was never a mere frolic of a few individual slavers like Edward Colston, but a phenomenon that in turn depended on an immense infrastructure provided by commerce and law.

This video, among other sources, shows how that phenomenon looked in the round.

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Positive vs Normative Statements – You may not want to blame the lawyers but it remains a fact that lawyers facilitate(d) slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality, and so on

8th August 2021

Today’s post is, in effect, a footnote to yesterday’s post on laws and systems – what connects slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality and so on.

The reason for this post is that some commenters responded to yesterday’s post as if my primary purpose were to impose blame on lawyers for their role in the facilitation of slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality and so on.

Lawyers were only doing their job, the responses went, and so it was rather unfair of me to blame them.

All they were doing was advising on the law, and that is what is lawyers do.

I was being unfair, the response averred.

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Such a protest is, in my view, to confuse positive and normative statements.

The existences of slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality, and so on, in any organised society does – as a matter of positive fact – require the involvement of those who make and deal with laws.

This is simply because such things can only exist in an organised society if they are permitted – or at least recognised – by law.

And in modern societies, there is often a distinct profession for those who practise in laws: lawyers.

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Whether any lawyers – individually or collectively – should be regarded as culpable for recognising or permitting activities is a separate and distinct argument to the one advanced in yesterday’s post

There may, for example, be a ‘cab rank’ rule which obliged lawyers to make submissions to court that they personally did not agree with.

Or the world-view of the time and place may have meant that, say, slavery, torture, or imperialism were not morally contested – and so it may be that it would not be historically fair to regard the lawyers enabling such activities as being especially culpable.

But even taking such normative points at their highest, there remains the positive and undeniable fact.

That is the positive fact that slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality, and so on, can only exist in any modern society because they are facilitated by those who deal with and practice in law.

And this remains true – even if we can excuse (or find excuses for) individual lawyers who participate(d) in recognising or permitting such activities.

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Laws and systems – what connects slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality and so on

7th August 2021

This is a depressing post about law and policy, but it is one which is triggered by work I am doing on a particular project.

One of the things that I am researching and writing is about how lawyers made possible slavery and the slave trade – a topic that I wrote about at Prospect magazine, as well as in previous posts on this blog and on Twitter (see here and here).

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Of course: human beings are capable of being cruel to other human beings without laws or lawyers.

An individual person can coerce another person, can torture another person, can expropriate the possessions of another person – and so on – without any legal system or advisers in place.

That, unfortunately, appears to be the nature of our species – at least given the archaeological and historical record.

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For enslavement, torture, expropriation – and so on – to exist in any organised society (that is, say, a human grouping larger than Dunbar’s Number) requires the help of norms and rules.

Either such practices will not be prohibited or such practices will be positively facilitated.

In other words: slavery, torture and imperialism in any society depend on systems of rules being in place that enable them.

And in such modern societies, where the practice of law is usually a distinct profession, this in turn means that such practices are facilitated by lawyers.

Lawyers draft the relevant legal instruments, and lawyers then advise those who seek to rely on legal rights as set out in those instruments and otherwise.

And many of these lawyers did so (and some still do, for example, with the torture memoranda in the United States) with absolute moral neutrality – they are not here to gainsay the law, but to advise on what one can get away with under the law.

A similar legal infrastructure exists still in respect of defending the police and other state actors in respect of coercion and lethal force against civilians.

None of this – from slavery to systemic police brutality – none of this would be possible, but for laws and those who make those laws work.

Of course: the saving grace is that there are laws which (supposedly) prohibit each of these things, and there are lawyers who will challenge such laws and defend those affected.

And such liberal and progressive laws and lawyers should be celebrated.

But.

It has to be laws and lawyers which take on slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality – and so on.

And this is because such things only exist in any organised society because of laws – and often lawyers – in the first place.

All that liberal and progressive  laws and lawyers are taking away are what other laws and lawyers provided in the first place.

**

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The Yorke-Talbot Opinion – and why Hardwicke Chambers are changing their name

24th June 2021

Last June, after the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, I did a thread on Twitter pointing to the historic complicity of the legal profession in slavery.

The second tweet in that thread mentioned a legal document of which few had heard: the Yorke-Talbot opinion of 1729.

The Yorke-Talbot opinion was an important and consequential legal document.

The opinion had the effect of legitimising slavery in Great Britain for decades.

Yet, it was not a judgment or an act of parliament or a royal charter or indeed any text usually regarded as having the force of law.

It was, as its name tells us, an opinion.

But it was the opinion of the government’s two most senior law officers for England and Wales: the attorney general and the solicitor general.

And although in those days such figures could also do private client work, the offices of the two lawyers meant that this opinion had the highest authority.

To modern eyes, however, the striking feature of the opinion is just how flimsy it is.

The relevant text in its entirety is:

‘In Order to rectify a Mistake, that Slaves become free, by their being in England, or Ireland or being baptized, it has been thought proper to consult the King’s Attorney and Solicitor General in England thereupon, who have given the following Opinion, subscribed with their own Hands.

‘We are of opinion, that a slave coming from the West-Indies to Great-Britain or Ireland, with or without his master, doth not become free, and that his master’s property or right in him is not thereby determined or varied; and that baptism doth not bestow freedom on him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms. We are also of opinion, that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations.’ 

You will see there is no authority cited, nor the application of any legal principle, nor the setting out of any jurisprudential reasoning.

A bare assertion of the law that would embarrass a law student in their first-term

Here is a facsimile of an early published version:

The purpose of this opinion was to counter the flow of increasingly liberal judgments on the slavery issue associated with Chief Justice Holt.

(A judge incidentally also associated with practically ending witchcraft trials.)

The consequence of the Yorke-Talbot opinion was to provide a legal device which all those involved in slavery and the slave trade – lawyers, traders, insurers, owners and so on – could rely on in the case of any doubts as the legality of slavery and the slave trade.

A piece of paper to wave in the face of any moral scruples or legal doubt.

A piece of paper with the high authority of the attorney general and the solicitor general.

It was the comfort and security needed for hardened men of business who made their fortunes and earned their professional fees out of this trade in human misery.

The great extension of British involvement in the slave trade was a feature of the period after 1729 – all under the legal cover of this Yorke-Talbot opinion.

It was not until Somerset’s case of 1772 that the courts began to decide otherwise.

Yorke and Talbot themselves did well out of their legal careers – both became lord chancellor, with Yorke taking the title of Lord Hardwicke.

(On this more generally, see my post here.)

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Hardwicke is a famous name in English legal history, and so things are named after him.

When I was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn, one of the scholarships that I was awarded was a Hardwicke scholarship (though they have recently been renamed entrance scholarships) and this paid for certain administrative fees attendant on becoming barrister.

Another thing named after Hardwicke is a set of barristers chambers in Lincoln’s Inn (where I once did a mini-pupillage).

There are other things too – it is just one of those great legal names, like Halsbury or Denning.

I did not think anything concrete would come of my thread, other than to generate interest in the often unpleasant history of the legal profession.

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But something did come of it, one year later.

I understand I am one of the legal bloggers referred to in that statement.

Hardwicke chambers, who were already changing location, had decided to use the move as an opportunity to change their name at the same time.

What happened was that, prompted by the thread and the interest it generated, I am told senior members of that chambers went off to research the subject for themselves:

And the barrister Nicholas Leah has now provided a thread on the opinion far more erudite than mine:

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And so – in the great traditions of the Bar – an independent chambers had been gently persuaded of a change of name and had done so on the basis of research and evidence.

Unfortunately one government minister, a senior barrister, decided that this smacked of woke-ism:

This was a silly intervention from someone who knows (or should know) better.

It indicates that the minister does not know (or does not care) about the exceptional nature of the Yorke-Talbot opinion and of its dire consequences.

One would have hoped that a minister in the department of justice would have congratulated a chambers for showing independence and making a decision based on persuasion and evidence.

Anyway, he was gently put right:

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The curious thing is that (similar to Edward Colston) the sheer number of things named after Hardwicke obscured rather than revealed his role in history.

What had been ‘erased’ from history was the York-Talbot opinion – and it is a document that should be better known to lawyers, historians and the general public.

Changing the name of a chambers (or of a scholarship) certainly does not erase Hardwicke – indeed, he is now more widely known about (again, like Edward Colston).

And a better understanding of how the legal system and lawyers facilitated slavery provides us with a fuller understanding of our own history.

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