In arguably the finest episode of television’s longest-running science fiction series—The Name of the Doctor—our eponymous hero looks down on a desolate and battle-blighted planet, the apparent scene of his death, and muses that he had always thought his retirement might comprise bee-keeping or watercolours. The nod to Conan Doyle was knowing. Picking up this handsome volume produces mixed feelings in this reviewer. I had always had taking a crack at a decent biography of the father of our commercial law, Sir William Murray, at or near the top of my list of “retirement” projects. Everything one knew about the first Earl of Mansfield intrigued, and provoked the desire to probe further: his already mentioned core achievement relevant to the readership of this Quarterly; his Scots and Jacobite roots, and progression from Whig to Tory minister; his involvement in the vexed topic of slavery and Somerset’s case (which informed the recent feature film Belle); the destruction of his home in the anti-Catholic Gordon riots, and his subsequent presiding at the trial of Gordon and other perpetrators, somewhat ineffectively as Poser recounts!

It was difficult to understand the neglect prior to this volume, although Poser identifies one of the principal difficulties for a biographer: the last-named conflagration destroyed many of Mansfield’s papers, including 200 notebooks (at 365). Previously we had an account in Lord Campbell, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England—From the Norman Conquest till the Death of Lord Mansfield (1849) volume II, chapters 30–40, and two—frankly inadequate—volumes by CHS Fifoot (1936) and Edmund Heward (1979). Professor Atiyah noted in The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (1979), 121, that “an adequate biography is still awaited”. However, since then we have had Professor James Oldham’s valuable two-volume analysis of key manuscripts, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (1992), subsequently condensed into English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (2004). Now Poser has largely filled the need.

As Poser notes in the Preface (ix) his continuing influence as judge means that this eighteenth-century legal behemoth is still quoted in US appellate authority in the twenty-first. So too in England, with Mance LJ referencing in Brotherton v Aseguradora Colseguros SA [2003] EWCA Civ 705, [2003] Lloyd’s Rep IR 746, [24] “that locus classicus of insurance law from the Age of the Enlightenment, Carter v Boehm (1766) 3 Burr 1905, 1910”. The subsequent history of (utmost) good faith has had a chequered history in less accomplished hands, with this year, rather dismally, seeing its effective excision from our marine insurance legislation. Nevertheless, there is at least one judicial cheerleader in the current Commercial Court for the broader concept of good faith in all contracts, which Mansfield expressly advocated. In academic terms Mansfield’s judgments provide three of the chapters of Charles Mitchell and Paul Mitchell (eds), Landmark Cases in the Law of Contract (2008).