Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/823

 J U S J U S 789 justice, and the lord chief justice of the Queen s Bench was I nominal head of all the three courts, and held the title of Lord Chief Justice of England. The titles of Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord Chief Baron have recently been abolished, and all the common law divisions of the High Court are united into the Queen s Bench division, the president of which is the lord chief justice of England. The lord chief justice of England or of the Queen s Bench traces his descent from the justiciar of the Norman kings. This officer appears first as the lieutenant or deputy of the king, exercising all the functions of the regal office in the .absence of the sovereign. &quot; In this capacity William Fitz- Osbern, the steward of Normandy, and Odo of Bayeux, acted during the Conqueror s visit to the Continent in 1067; they were left, according to William of Poitiers, the former to govern the north of England, the latter to hold rule in Kent, vice sua ; Florence of Worcester describes them as &quot;custodes Anglian,&quot; and Ordericus Vitalis gives to their office the name of &quot; praefectura.&quot; It would seem most pro bable that William Fitz-Osbern at least was left in his character of steward, and that the Norman seneschalship was thus the origin of the English justiciarship,&quot; Stubbs s Constitutional History, vol. i. p. 346. The same authority observes that William of Warenne and Richard of Bien- faite, who were left in charge of England in 1074, are named by a writer in the next generation &quot; prsecipui AngliiB justitiarii&quot;; but he considers the name to have not yet been definitely attached to any particular office, and that there is no evidence to show that officers appointed to this trust exercised any functions at all when the king was at home, or in his absence exercised supreme judicial authority to the exclusion of other high officers of the court. The office became permanent in the reign of William Rufus, .and in the hands of llanulf Flambard it became coextensive with the supreme powers of government. For some time, however, the title of justiciar seems not to have been definitely appropriated to this high minister. Judges of the curia regis were occasionally so named, and it was not till the reign of Henry II. that the chief officer of the crown acquired the exclusive right to the title of capitalis or totius Anglise, justitiarius. Canon Stubbs considers that the English form of the office is to be accounted for by the king s desire to prevent the administration falling into the hands of an hereditary noble. The early justiciars were clerics, in whom the possession of power could not become hereditary. The justiciar continued to be the chief officer of state, next to the king, until the fall of Hubert de Burgh (in the reign of King John), described by Mr Stubbs as the last of the great justiciars. Henceforward, according to Mr Stubbs, the office may be regarded as virtually extinct, or it may be said to have survived only in the judicial functions, which were merely part of the official character of the chief justiciar. He was at the head of the curia regis, which was separating itself into the three historical courts of common law about the time when the justiciarship was falling from the supreme place. The chancellor took the place of the justiciar in council, the treasurer in the exchequer, while the two otfshots from the curia regis, the Common Pleas and the Exchequer, received chiefs of their own. The Queen s Bench represented the original stock of the curia regis, and its chief justice the great justiciar. The justiciar may, therefore, be said to have become from a p olitical a purely judicial officer. A similar development awaited his successful rival the chancellor. The lord chief justice is, next to the lord chancellor, the highest judicial dignitary in the kingdom. The office is generally the prize of the chief law officer of the Govern ment, and political considerations, therefore, enter largely into the appointment. But the chief justices have been generally worthy of their great position. The list of them contains the names of some of the greatest masters of the common law, among whom pre-eminent rank must be as signed to Hale, Coke, Holt, Mansfield, and Cockburn. Lord Campbell has written the Lives of the Chief Justices, in 3 vols. A list of the lords chief justices will be found in Haydn s Book of Dignities, 1851. Robert de Brus, said by Fox to be the first judge who took the distinctive title of lord chief justice of the King s Bench (1268), was the grandfather of Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland. In the United States the supreme court consists of a chief justice and eight associate justices, any five of whom make a quorum. The salary of the chief justice is $10,500, and that of the associates $10,000. JUSTICE OF THE PEACE is an inferior magistrate appointed in England by special commission under the great seal to keep the peace within the county for which he is appointed. &quot; The whole Christian world,&quot; said Lord Coke, &quot;hath not the like office as justice of the peace it duly executed.&quot; Lord Cowper, on the other hand, describes them as &quot; men sometimes illiterate and frequently bigoted and prejudiced.&quot; The truth is that the justices of the peace perform without any other reward than the consequence they acquire from their office a large amount of work indispensable to the administration of the law, and for the most part they discharge their duties with becoming good sense and impartiality. But being chosen from the limited class of country gentlemen in counties, they are sometimes exposed to the suspicion of the general public, particularly when they have to administer laws which are considered to confer special privileges on their own class. Further, as they do not generally possess a professional knowledge of the law, their decisions are occasionally inconsiderate and ill-informed. In great centres of population, when the judicial business of justices is heavy, it has been found necessary to appoint paid justices or stipendiary magistrates to do the work, and an extension of the system to the country districts has been often advocated. The commission of the peace is addressed to all the justices of the county, and assigns to them the duty of keeping and causing to be kept all ordinances and statutes for the good of the peace and for preservation of the same, and for the quiet rule and government of the people, and further assigns &quot; to you and every two or more of you (of whom any one of the aforesaid A, B, C, D, &c., we will, shall be one) to inquire the truth more fully by the oath of good and lawful men of the county of all and all manner of felonies, poisonings, enchantments, sorceries, arts, magic, trespasses, forestallings, regratings, engrossings, and extor tions whatever.&quot; This part of the commission is the Justices named specially in the parenthetical clause are said to be on the quorum. Justices cannot act beyond the limits of the county for which they are appointed, and the warrant of a justice cannot be executed out of his county unless it be backed, that is, endorsed by a justice of the county in which it is to be carried into execution. A justice improperly refusing to act on his office, or acting partially and corruptly, may be proceeded against by a criminal information, and a justice refusing to act may be compelled to do so by the High Court of Justice. An action will lie against a justice for any act done by him in excess of his jurisdiction, and for any act within his jurisdiction which has been done wrongfully and v.-ith malice, and without reasonable or probable cause. But no action can be brought against a justice fora wrongful conviction until it has been quashed. By 18 Geo. II. c. 20 every justice for a county must have an estate of freehold, copyhold, or customary tenure in fee, for life or a given term, of the
 * authority for the jurisdiction of the justices in sessions.