In 1772 the English poet William Cowper greeted the celebrated King’s Bench decision in the Somerset case with the verse: ‘Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free’. The anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp was part of Somerset’s legal team and held the bible to be ‘the urtext of all English law’, believing that ‘all English law sprang from this just and noble soil’ Eric Metaxes, Amazing Grace, p. 103. But surely the Ten Commandments, a key part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, are outdated and outmoded…Or are they?
Join us at City Legal as Dr Peter Jensen begins a three-week series on the Ten Commandments.
Bible reference(s):
Exodus 20:1-3
