Only recently has the existence of chattel slavery in antebellum Massachusetts been widely acknowledged. Besides the early "freedom" suits prosecuted by enslaved people in Massachusetts, much of the state's law concerning the pernicious institution came from Supreme Judicial Court Justice Lemuel Shaw, from West Barnstable, who was the most influential state-court justice of the 19th century. He decided several “fugitive-slave” cases as well as the Boston school-desegregation case that established “separate but equal”--that case led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision, cementing that segregationist doctrine in American law until the 1950s.