Special Courts: Vice-Admiralty and Chancery

Vice-admiralty and chancery courts developed independently of the hierarchical layering of the indigenous colonial courts. The former provided imperial control and commercial coherence to ocean trading. In the seventeenth century governors had acted in the capacity of vice-admirals, handling disputes arising out of maritime matters such as prize, wrecks, insurance, and seaman's wages. Parliament in 1696 authorized separate vice-admiralty courts as part of its larger program to tighten the imperial grip. These new courts brought the highly technical law of admiralty to the colonies. The judges received fixed fees and percentage payments of the goods they condemned, a practice that denied colonial assemblies control over their salaries.

The colonists resented the courts even though they offered important commercial advantages. Vice-admiralty judges, who were often Americans, placed colonial merchants and customs racketeers on short legal leashes in commercial dealings with their

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English masters. Moreover, the colonists, who coveted the benefits of local control through trial by jury, resented the prerogative nature of the vice-admiralty proceedings.

Chancery courts were also controversial because governors sought in their capacity as chancellors to seek political ends rather than justice. The English courts of chancery, which by the seventeenth century had become as complex as the common law courts, were not easily transferred to the colonies. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania rejected them outright; elsewhere, they developed only fitfully.

Equity, however, had emerged in the colonies as a matter of practice if not of form. Seventeenth century colonial lay judges exercised a kind of equity through the laxity with which they followed common law precedents. But as the English tightened control over the colonies in the eighteenth century, governors discovered that by assuming the status of chancellors they could extend the reach of their authority. In New York, for example, Governor William Burnet established himself as chancellor and proceeded to collect feudal dues owed in the form of quit rents in the Hudson River Valley. (Tenants paid a fee to quit, to be free of personal service or other obligations to a lord.) Burnet's successor went so far as to use his position as chancellor to question the validity of one of the colonies most extensive land patents.

The furor over equity practice subsided by the mid- eighteenth century, and the growing technicality of the common law system in the colonies revived interest in it. There was a "generally recognized need for equity as a part of the . . . American legal system," but it was accepted only after the colonies had either adopted viable chancery courts free of gubernatorial influence or granted this jurisdiction to the common law courts. ¹⁷

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 785