9 June 1807

D2

Letter V

v. No Appeals

v. Insubordination

With submission, my Lord, it strikes me that before the door of the House was proposed to be thus inexorably shut against all Appeals from Interlocutors it might not have been labour altogether misspent, to enquire into the proportion between the number of Appeals complaining of Interlocutors alone, and the number of Appeals complaining of final judgments.

An apprehension strikes me lest, upon a search of that kind it might here and there be matter of some difficulty to find an Appeal to the House of Lords complaining of any thing else besides an Interlocutor: and thereupon, supposing the proposed arrangement passed into a law, to find the jurisdiction which the House of Lords would continue to exercise over that one, the northernmost, of his Majesty's three kingdoms.

The ground of this apprehension is - that in: Vol. │ │ of the Decisions of the Court of Session as published by the Faculty of Advocates, in the whole number of Decisions there stated as appealed from, viz. I can not find a single one in which the decision complained of was any thing but an Interlocutor.

Should it even turn out (though for the present purpose the inquiry is not worth making) that every final judgment is at one period, and that a previous one, of its existence, an Interlocutor, as every man is first a man still in my humble view of the matter it would not be much mended by the discovery: because if in Scotland it be of the nature of all final judgments, first to be in the state of Interlocutors I can not, in the plan of Your Lordship's learned Reformer discover any thing that should prevent their continuing in that state.