1st Earl of Mansfield was born William Murray on March 2, 1705, at Scone, Scotland, the fourth son of the 5th Viscount of Stormont and his wife, Margaret, née Scott, and one of eleven children.
Scion of a poor and noble family, he went to England at the age of 14.
Murray was educated at Perth Grammar School, where he was taught Latin, English grammar, and essay writing skills.
After an examination in May 1723, Murray was accepted into Christ Church, Oxford, having scored higher in the examination than any other King's Scholar that year.
He became a barrister in 1730, entered parliament in 1742, and was for 14 years a minister of the Crown. A moderate Tory, he served as solicitor-general, attorney-general, and leader of the House of Commons.
As chief justice of the king's bench, his genius flowered, and for 32 years he dominated the law. As a jurist he was both rationalist and reformer, and he sought to eliminate pedantry and technicalities. In retrospect his qualities are conspicuous in four fields.
He founded both English and U. S. modern commercial law by translating trade practices into the law without sacrificing flexibility. In quasi-contract he generalized the scattered fragments of case law upon the basis of unjust enrichment, holding that the court could enforce an obligation in the absence of a contract where not doing so would result in the unjust enrichment of one party at the expense of another.
Today, if sometimes criticized, this concept is winning acceptance, especially in the United States, in the related doctrine of restitution. In contract and in his treatment of equity, a system of law which grew up side by side with the common law as a way to avoid common law rigidities, he was too far in advance of his age to win the same success.
But the moral obligation behind a promise which he emphasized, and the fusion of common law and equity he advocated, at least represented a generous approach to vital problems that has attracted ardent minds in the United States as in Britain. Never a "mere lawyer, " he was at once a cultured man of the world, a jurist, and a judge. He was created Earl of Mansfield in 1776.
His decisions reflected the Age of Enlightenment and moved England on the path to abolishing slavery and the slave trade. He advanced commercial law in ways that helped establish the nation as the world leader in industry, finance and trade. He modernised both English law and the English courts system; he sped up the system for submitting motions and reformed the way judgments were given to reduce time and expense for the parties. For his work in Carter v Boehm and Pillans v Van Mierop, he has been called the founder of English commercial law.
In politics he was adroit, persuasive, and prudent, but it was with relief that he accepted appointment as chief justice of the king's bench, the highest common law court, with the title of Lord Mansfield, in 1756.
Unlike other barristers, Mansfield was noted for always keeping a cool head and being "prudent to the point of timidity". He was criticised for being "moderate and dispassionate".
Murray married Elizabeth Finch. They did not have children and took on care of their niece, Lady Elizabeth Murray, after her mother died.
When Mansfield's nephew Captain Sir John Lindsay returned to Britain in 1765 following the Seven Years' War and his assignment in the West Indies, he brought his natural daughter Elizabeth. Of half African descent, she was born into slavery in 1761, the daughter of Maria Bell, an enslaved woman.
Lindsay asked Murray to take on her care and education, and she was baptized Dido Elizabeth Belle in 1766 in London.
