PRIVY COUNCIL APPEALS. A Humiliation to the Colonial Bench.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 264, 22 July 1905, Page 6

PRIVY COUNCIL APPEALS. A Humiliation to the Colonial Bench.

ON the Gilbertian principle that the surest way to be made ruler of the "King's Navee" is to stay at home and never go to> sea, the lawyers of the House of Lords have hitherto been considered the only fit persons to decide points of law about matters they have never before heard of. Apparently, the Lords of the Privy Council, in, dealing with appeal cases from the colonies, and especially with New Zealand cases, consider it incumbent on them to upset the ruling of the highest courts, not, as one would imagine, because they are at all competent to over-rule men learned in the laws and conditions of the colonies, but because they have got to do something to justify their existence as a final court of appeal for the Empire. • ♦ « If the law lords know as little about New Zealand as the average Englishman, they probably conceive of our Chief Justice as a tattooed warrior m a feathered mat. It would be quite as 1 reasonable for the Wellington Corporation to ask the London Corporation to> decide whether it should run motor 'busses- or electric cars to> Miramar, as for the Appeal Court of New Zealand to be obliged to refer a question of riparian rights to the antiquated fossils of the House of Lords*. • * • Most of the cases referred to the aged gentlemen for decision have never been heard of by the aged gentlemen before, and it is necessary therefore for the aged ones to 1 "swat" up the colonial-made law on the subject m order to find out what the intention of the colonial Legislature has been in the connection, which is absurd. It is the Lords who dictate to certain districts in. New Zealand the right or otherwise of the inhabitants to drink beer or leave it alone. Not knowing anything about local conditions, their dictum is "drink beer." • • • In New Zealand the people natter themselves that they, through their representatives, govern the country If anyone appealed to the Lords for a decision on the point, the Lords would probably decide that the people were in error, and that they themselves governed this country As long as the power of appeal to the Lords is given in shaky cases, so

long will the most capable and learned men New Zealand owns be subject to humiliation, and law costs will go on piling up to give luckylawyers cheap trips to the Old Country. The Government, probably because it looks like cutting one' or two strands of the painter, isi loth to make it unnecessary to take appeals sixteen thousand miles for settle Iment. If, however, this were done, it is conceivable that the law lords, being old and tired, would be quite glad. It is a cruelty to the dear old gentlemen to suddenly confront them with a matter they have never heard anything of, and which they are therefore bound to expend midnight oil on, and it is only to be expected that they should be exceedingly angry at being made to work overtime. Consequently, they are liable at all times to suggest by their findings that colonial judges know nothing of the laws of their own colonies. As for the lawyers, they would get reconciled in time to the loss of these free trips and frolicsome times in the Old Country.