VIII THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND THE EXTENSION OF ENGLISH LAW The characteristics of Council proceedings were such that the records are most fruitful on matters of administration and procedure; they have much less to yield in respect of substantive law. In the sum total of this body's functions judicial activity was only a small fraction, and since the bulk of duties discharged was essentially advisory or administrative, the Council clerks were not concerned with common law standards of recordation, and still less with the contemporary urge for unofficial reporting. The circumstance that in point of numbers the Council was predominantly lay and that even when sitting as a committee hearing an appeal it was not envisaged as acting in the same capacity as the central courts tended to blur the outlines of what in reality it was doing —contributing by a series of ad hoc determinations to the creation of a special jurisprudence governing the dominions outside the realm. Certain incidents of this Council jurisprudence have already been noticed in connection with policy and procedural questions discussed in previous chapters. Most of these incidents relate to matters of private law, and because of the sporadic quality of the appeal jurisdiction inherent in the limitations as to subject matter and appealable minimums, a sort of judicial isolation characterized the Council's work. Its decisions had as precedents little or no relation to the body of the law in England, because the Council possessed no locus standi in the judicial system of the realm itself and had a relation to the private law of a particular colony of little effect beyond the instant case. In other words, if the Council made some novel application of the rule in Shelley's Case, it added little to the real property law of England, 1 and its Order was unlikely to produce change in colony law, because colonial lawyers habitually clung to English printed precedents. 2 It was otherwise in respect to certain matters which may be described as basic problems of public law, which were 1 One of the rare instances of a colonial appeal cited at Westminster is a Barbados case involving the construction of a will in which there were three appeals (3 APC, Col., #225). The citation is to Morris v. Wood where Chief Justice Raymond and Lord Justice Eyre on March 24, 1730/1, held the gift to be an estate tail; see Colson v. Colson (2 At\. 247 at 249, 2 Strange 1125) and Doe ex dem. Long v. Laming (2 Burr. 1100 at 1102). 2 Our conclusion is based upon the scores of lawyers' briefs and trial memoranda of many colonial jurisdictions that have come to our attention. In so far as one may properly speak of colonial precedent, this has to do mainly with practice precedents. Provincial lawyers of