neither his Majesty, nor his Privy Council, have or ought to have any jurisdiction, 
power or authority, by English bill, petition, articles, libel, or any other arbitrary 
way whatsoever, to examine or draw into question, determine or dispose of the 
lands, tenements, hereditaments, goods or chattels of any of the subjects of this 
Kingdom; but that the same ought to be tried and determined in the ordinary courts 
of justice, and by the ordinary course of the law. 
This language, it will be observed, was very sweeping, and as to the immediate 
grievances which called the statute into being was an effective panacea. 
How in the face of such legislation authority remained for the promotion of 
a widespread exercise of appellate jurisdiction by the Privy Council over the 
courts of the Channel Islands, the several American colonies, the Isle of Man, 
East India, Gibraltar, and Minorca is a question which needs some answering. 
The mere fact that these areas of jurisdiction were almost all dominions of 
the crown outside the realm does not afford a sufficiently comprehensive ex- 
planation, 2 for despite the terms of the act the King in Council retained vestigial 
domestic appellate jurisdiction in two instances: appeals from the Lord 
Chancellors of England and of Ireland sitting in lunacy 3 and appeals from the 
Court of the Warden of the Stannaries of Cornwall, in the absence of a Prince 
of Wales. 4 The answer is rather to be found in the phrase "by the ordinary 
course of the law," the intendment of which is illumined by the preamble of 
the statute. This preamble, through the device of reciting the purport of various 
ancient enactments from Magna Carta down into the reign of Henry VIII, 
sets up a sort of indefeasible hereditament of due process. The restoration of 
this inheritance is to be effected by the annihilation of all extraordinary jurisdiction 
and by the rehabilitation of the common law courts in what the Parliament 
conceives their historic role to have been. We are not concerned with the 
legislature's perversion of history, but solely with the undeniable fact that the 
"ordinary course of the law" could be fixed only by a reference to this history. 
At the time when the statute was passed, and by the very tests chosen to justify 
it, the "ordinary course of the law" for two of the dominions of the crown, 
Jersey and Guernsey, embraced an appeal from the courts of these islands to 
King in Council. This appellate authority, then, was the small goods rescued 
from the conflagration of the revolution, and thenceforward, as we shall see, B 
2 But cf. 1 Blackstone, Commentaries on the 
Laws of England, 231; 2 Anson, Law and 
Custom of the Constitution, Part II (4th ed., 
1935)> 3 21 > Bentwich, Practice of the Privy 
Council in Judicial Matters (1912), 5. The 
term "dominion" is used throughout in the 
eighteenth-century sense, not in the modern 
sense of. a "dominion," as opposed to a "crown 
colony." 
3 3 Peere Williams, 111; Macqueen, A Practical 
Treatise on the Appellate Jurisdiction of the 
House of Lords and Privy Council (1842), 
752-53; 1 Blackstone, Commentaries, 231. 
* 1 Rolle, Abridgment, 745; Rawlinson MS, C 
441/62; "Treatise on Error," Singleton MS, 
44/6. Cf. 3 Blackstone, Commentaries, 80. 
5 See infra, pp. 202-8, 418-22.