ROMAN-DUTCH LAW AND THE WEST INDIAN 
APPEAL COURT. 
A REPLY. 
By J. J. NUNAN, B.A., LLB. 
I welcome with pleasure Mr. Registrar Dalton’s thoughtful contribution to 
the subject raised by my address. A representative Commission has recently 
been appointed by the Acting Governor to consider the matter and to make 
any necessary recommendations. Whatever views its Chairman or any in- 
dividual member may hold, the question is unlikely to be prejudged. 
Mr. Dalton has shown very clearly that in South Africa the Roman-Dutch 
law is a living thing, warmly supported by the general public and by the local 
bar, and that lawyers born in Europe, including my own fellow-countrymen 
(the shades of Porter and Upington, no doubt, being called upon me by 
an argument ad verecundiam) become in those surroundings most 
brilliant exponents of a jurisprudence to which they were not born. 
The Judges themselves are appointed locally from the leading practi- 
tioners. The case of the importation of that very able lawyer, Sir William 
Smith, from the Roman-Dutch Chief Justiceship of this country to a 
seat upon the Transvaal bench, was due to the special necessities of the 
post-bellum reconstruction and is not likely to form a precedent. The 
Judges of this colony, on the other hand, are usually appointed from 
magistracies or judgeships in other colonies, and have to begin the study 
of a wholly new system of law on their arrival, a Herculean task for any men 
who have passed the grand climacteric, especially if they are men who have 
been long severed from or never actually engaged in practice at the bar. 
Mr. Dalton has made no attempt to show that in this colony the Roman- 
Dutch law is not a dead thing, beloved by none, seriously studied by none, 
unattractive to a community from which the last Dutch element vanishea 
generations ago, a community which looks to England or to English-speaking 
Canada and the United States, where English common law prevails, for its 
supplies of capital and fresh colonists. Whether English or Roman-Dutch 
law is the more equitable system is a matter on which opinions may 
differ, and on which such South African writers as he quotes, can hardly 
be considered unbiassed. Pure Roman law or the various codes based upon 
the Napoleonic, considered as organised moral and ethical philosophic struc- 
tures are probably superior to both. Both Holland and Surinam abolished 
Roman-Dutch law a century ago, but we have proved more Batavian than 
the Dutch. 
Mr. Dalton’s arguments are mostly quite beside the issue, which is 
that what was once a more or less uniform structure is now a mere 
wreck. It is not a case of aiming at a higher ideal, which is an 
