Monday, November 17, 2008

Western European Tribunals

Medieval courts were an outgrowth of the tribal courts of the Germanic peoples, among whom the highest judicial authority was that of the popular assemblies that met regularly throughout the year. The tribal judges supervised the proceedings and executed the judgments rendered by the assemblies. During the development of the Germanic tribal organization into territorial states, the primitive tribal courts underwent a corresponding evolution, increasing in number and becoming differentiated. Among the new features of this Teutonic system were a royal court, presided over by the king and modeled on the Roman system of courts; special lower courts under the control of royal officials who were called Grafen, which handled minor matters; and, later, a corps of permanent lay judges, with power to render judgments.

In the 8th century, when the Germanic territorial states were part of the realm of Charlemagne, the Teutonic judicial system experienced a further significant development: the practice, initiated by Charlemagne, of dispatching royal commissioners to examine the functioning of local courts and, when necessary, to supplement the justice they dispensed. In this innovation were the seeds of three later important legal developments: assize courts, circuit courts, and a central legal authority. This innovation was adopted by other feudal monarchs in their struggles with the landed nobility, who controlled the manorial, or seignorial, courts.

When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they imposed the Carolingian judicial system on the Anglo-Saxons. In the long struggle between king and landed nobility that ensued, one of the principal weapons of the Crown was the Curia Regis (king's court), which was held wherever the royal household was situated. The principal judicial strongholds of the nobility were the manorial courts, chiefly the courts baron and courts leet. Judicial supremacy eventually was won by the Crown, and, since the reign of King Edward I, in the 13th century, English courts have been organized on a centralized basis.

Before this victory of the Crown, however, King John had been compelled in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta, which initiated the gradual separation of judicial from executive and legislative governmental powers. The terms of this charter of liberty established the Court of Common Pleas as a court of a fixed location to try cases initiated by commoners against other commoners. The process of separation continued during the reign of Edward I with the establishment of the Court of Exchequer as a tribunal having exclusive jurisdiction over revenue cases arising out of unpaid debts to the Crown and the establishment of the Court of King's Bench, or the Court of Queen's Bench, as the supreme appellate tribunal of the realm, presided over by the monarch. The Court of King's, or Queen's, Bench also was invested with original jurisdiction over both civil and criminal cases and thus encroached on the jurisdiction of the Court of Common Pleas. In fact, the jurisdictions of all three courts overlapped and were not entirely differentiiated until much later. These courts later became bulwarks in the defense of civil and political liberties against the Crown.

Another momentous innovation during the reign of Edward I was provision for doing justice in situations in which the common law failed to afford a remedy to aggrieved litigants. This supplemental system of justice was administered by the Crown through the lord chancellor and was called chancery, or equity, jurisprudence.

In the centuries after the signing of the Magna Carta, Parliament acquired appellate jurisdiction over both civil and criminal cases. This function was subsequently confined to the House of Lords and has survived to the present day. In 1701, Parliament enacted legislation establishing tenure of office for judges and made their removal from office conditional on the assent of Parliament, thus completing the separation of judicial from executive and legislative governmental powers. Like many other features of the English judicial system, this separation of powers was incorporated into the courts of the New World.

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