198 Timehri. 



tory, with headquarters at Port-of-Spain. The right of appeal to the 

 King in Council was not to be affected.O) As to the constitution of the 

 Court, it was agreed that it should consist of the Chief Justices of 

 Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana, Barbados and the Leeward 

 Islands, and the senior substantive Chief Justice of the Windward Islands 

 and that the first-named Chief Justice should be ex officio President. 

 But a proposal that the Act should also make provision for the appoint- 

 ment of a " barrister judge " from the United Kingdom revealed great 

 differences of opinion among the delegates, those from Barbados, the 

 Leeward Islands, and Grenada being strongly opposed to the suggestion, 

 on the ground that it was unnecessary and, in any event, too expensive, 

 while the delegates from Rritish Guiana and Trinidad (who urged that the 

 Colonies they represented would probably contribute seven-eighths of the 

 total number of appeals to the Appeal Court) expressed a decided opinion 

 in its favour. It is understood that this qnestiou has proved a serious 

 stumbling-block, and has not yet been adjusted. We may, however, ven- 

 ture to express a hope that the obstacle will not prove insuperable. 



The total annual cost of the Appeal Court is estimated at about 

 £1,500, exclusive of the salary of any judge brought in from outside. 



The connexion between the proposal to create a West Indian Court 

 of Appeal, on the one one hand, and the before-mentioned legislative 

 reforms in British Guiana, on the other, is this : In appeals 

 from British Guiana the Appeal Court would have to administer 

 British Guiana law. Now, the common law of British Guiana 

 was Roman-Dutch law. The only member of the Court of 

 Appeal, however, who could be relied on to know Roman-Dutch law 

 would be the Chief Justice of British Guiana (who could not sit in 

 appeals from his own decisions), and (possibly) the " barrister judge " (if 

 any) imported from outride. The result would be that, in the words of 

 Mr. Nunan, the judges of the Appeal Court would have " to plunge into 

 the study of a [to them] new system of jurisprudence for the benefit of 

 litigants in British Guiana." And since (to quote the Report of the 

 Common Law Commission, p. 21) "the serious study of the [Roman- 

 Dutch] common law is a matter of years of patient labour. . . . the pros- 

 pect of decisions on [that] law by West Indian judges based upon casual 

 study for tiie purpose of trying isolated cases is not attractive." The 

 conclusion drawn from this state of things was that such parts of the 

 Roman-Dutch law as it was desired to preserve for the Colony should be 

 embodied in an Ordinance, and the remainder abolished. This, as already 

 explained, has now been done. Some doubt may, however, be expressed 

 whether, even so, an Ordinance resting in fact on a basis of Roman- 

 Dutch law can be satisfactorily handled and interpreted by a Court that 

 makes no claim to have knowledge of that law. 



1 Appeals from the Colonics in question to the King in Council are not numerous. In 

 the five years commencing in 1910 there were only five — three from Trinidad and Tobago, and 

 two from British Guiana. 



