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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1840 Original Publisher: C.C. Little and J. Brown Description: Reproduction of original in the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign Campus) Library. Subjects: Massachusetts Courts Lawyers Judges Law Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. The Judicial Department of the Colonial Government from 1630 to 1686, with its officers and forms of proceedings. The power of establishing courts of justice was assumed by the colonists without any grant of authority in their charter. (1 Pitkin 42. White's Prob. 9.) But the necessity of such tribunals must have been so obvious, after the separation of the company and its government from England, that it seems to have been acquiesced in, even by the crown, without any serious objection to the jurisdiction which they assumed, so long as it was confined to their own citizens and to their own affairs. It was not until several years after the establishment of the colony that a regular system of courts of justice was settled, and even then the powers and jurisdiction of some of them were left vague and indefinite. The principal of these were the General Court, the Court of Assistants, County Courts, Strangers' Courts, Inferior or Magistrates' Courts, Military Courts and the Courts of Chancery. The highest in dignity and power, of these tribunals, was the General Court, in which judicial matters were heard and decided, like other questions that came before it, by the votes of majorities. Until the year 1639 this court seems to have exercised the whole power, both legislative and judicial, of the colony, and to have heldjurisdiction both in civil and criminal matters. i But in 1639 a new organiz...

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