2 Jan y 1808

Jurisdiction Table. Table VII

2

Notes

English distinction between King's Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer and Common Law Chancery jurisdictions - a distinction the rational causes of which, if it ever had any have long ago ceased. Accident set up the barriers; mutual and universal rapacity has in many parts broken them down. Competition, a state of things which in the institution of the divisions was not only not arrived at but endeavoured to be excluded, brought forward of late years in the character of an advantage, to reconcile the people to a system of confusion produced by rapacity, working by fraud and usurpation.

Felicity of Scotch judicature, in being free from this sources of complication, as well as that produced by the distinction between Law and Equity.

Scotch Court of Exchequer: a judicatory necessary perhaps at the time of its establishment; less necessary, if at all, at present.

Absurdity and inequity, fraud and hypocrisy - See Duress attached to the distinction between Law and Equity: - the same Judge acting with equal regularity and complacency, in execution[?] of two repugnant rules[?] of action: two repugnant systems of substantive Law: stopping with one of his hands the work he has been doing with another: giving to A at one time, what on a call from B he is predetermined to take back from A at another. Common Law, a weaker sort of law, by which a precarious [...?] is sold at an inferior price: Equity Law, another sort of law, on which, as being stronger, a higher price is put. When, on payment of the Common Law price, the less opulent of two litigants has been put in possession of an article of property, the Judge, titles remaining unchanged, on securing from the Equity price[?], adjudges the property to the more opulent customer, and calls this Equity.