Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/423

 11. REINSCH: COLONIAL COMMON LAW 409 A court of chancery was established as early as 1697, in which the English chancery practice was in the main adhered to.^ At a very early date trained lawyers were among the judges in these colonies ; in the year 1729 we find that on the question of the effect of a general pardon an English case ^ is cited and followed in the adjudication, one of the earliest instances where such a use of English authorities can be ascertained. In South Carolina, the city of Charleston was for almost a hundred years the seat of the colonial court, the source and center of judicial proceedings. This of course was favorable to an earlier reception of the English common law, as a cen- tralized system of judicial administration always leads to a more highly developed form of juristic conceptions. On the other hand this concentration of jurisdiction had the effect of leaving large tracts of the colony virtually without regular administration of the law, so that in the remoter parts of South Carolina associations of regulators had to be formed to deal out a rough popular justice.^ Anthony Stokes, Chief Justice of Georgia, in his Viem of the Constitution of the British colonies of North America and the West Indies, London, 1783, gives a very interesting dis- cussion of the state of legal administration in the southern colonies. He states that the colonies where the system of county courts prevailed, where there were a large number of judges in general unacquainted with the law, little decorum was observed in the courts ; but the colonies where the judges of the superior court went on circuit had a more impartial administration of justice. A system of circuit courts, how- ever, was not established in the colonies in the 17th century, except for a short time in Virginia. And the lack of a har- monious, unified, and consistent rule of adjudication may be inferred from the one fact of the absence of a unified judi- ciary. Of course a system of appeal would tend to unify the law, but in these early days an appeal to a central court was by no means an easy matter, and, in the ordinary administra- tion of justice the citizens undoubtedly took their law from the » 2 Croke, 148. * Ramsay's History of South Carolina, p. 120.
 * Hawks, History of North Carolina, II, 134.