of about four shillings, and of sentencing to three days' imprisonment.
All cases demanding severer treatment are relegated to the Guernsey
Courts. Enough has been said to show that Mr. Ansted was justified in
declaring that though the islanders were unfitted by their habits and
education for any radical change in their peculiar institutions, yet "the
practice of the law courts both in Jersey and Guernsey has long been felt
to be in many cases cumbrous, not to say objectionable. Indeed, where so
much that is personal interferes in the administration of justice, and
where personal and family influence cannot but be felt, it is not
astonishing that reasonable complaints are sometimes heard." Three times
during the present century Royal Commissions have enquired into Jersey
law, but their recommendations have been systematically ignored. No
remedies have been carried out, and the islanders cling with extraordinary
pertinacity to customs which are notoriously abused and to priveleges
which are opposed to fair-dealing. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man
are standing evidence of the danger incurred by such independence of legal
authority as they have hitherto been permitted to enjoy.
The Little Inns of Court.
The origin of the decadent institutions located in certain grim and
dreary-looking piles of building dotting the district of the Inns of Court
proper, and known as the little Inns of Court, is involved in considerable
obscurity. They appear to have originally held a similar position to the
great seats of legal education as the halls of Oxford and Cambridge do to
the Universities. But at the present time their relation to the Inns of
Court proper is not very clear, and the uses they serve, otherwise than as
residential chambers, are just as hard to discover. This state of
mistiness concerning them has existed so long that no one now seems to
know anything about them, and the evidence taken more than forty years ago
by a Royal Commission did so little to clear away the dust and cobwebs
hanging about them that they still remain, in the words of Lord Dundreary,
"things that no fellow can understand."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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