did not attempt to override the letter of the law. However, in Carpenter v. Potter (1748), an action for waste begun in the Inferior Court of Common Pleas, the Rhode Island Superior Court of Judicature boldly faced the issue of applicability with regard to general statutes of the realm, all of which had been passed antecedent to emigration. Plaintiff founded his action upon the medieval statutes of England regarding waste. Defendant pleaded that such acts had no force in any court of the colony, since they did not specifically extend to the colony and had not been introduced by any act of assembly. The plea was overruled, the case committed to the jury, and judgment given for the plaintiff for £250 damages and costs. Upon appeal to the Superior Court of Judicature in March, 1748/9, Potter "reinforced" his plea in bar, the judgment of the Inferior Court was reversed, and the action barred. 80 Petition was made for statutory relief against the effect of this judgment in excluding the laws of England from the colony, 81 and in February, 1749/50, an act was passed declaring specified acts of Parliament to be in force in the colony. 82 The confused state of opinion in Rhode Island is attributable to the belief that the only valid test of extension of an English statute was its applicability to local conditions and that this state of fact the colonists alone were capable of deciding. Allowing even for the exigencies of argument, the attitude is apparently one of guarded and rather general hostility. There is no recognition of a distinction between statutes made before and after settlement. And although the courts gave no aid and comfort to the suggestion, there is doubt cast even upon the rule of specific reference. Many years were to pass before such challenge of Parliament's right to legislate was to become current. In most colonies during the first half of the century it was rather the concern of the provincials to claim even what, on the technical grounds asserted by the Privy Council, was not intended for them, in other words all new statutes of general nature. It is beyond our purpose to ferret out the details of statutory reception. In the immune zone beneath the fixed amounts of civil appeals, the colonial judicial records show a general and widespread practice of using as applicable English acts passed after colonization in which the dominions were not named. In criminal proceedings, where the jurisdiction was virtually exempt from tive to the King's subjects" within Rhode Island, "as well as the laws of the same colony already made and provided in cases where real estates are to be atteached for the recovery of debts of any kind" (MS R.I. Cases in Equity, 1741, Part I, #34). The same reasons of appeal were set out in Peckham v. Cornell (ibid., 1741, Part 11, #7); Peckham v. Fryers (ibid., 1741, Part 11, #11). But in all three cases the Equity Court upheld the extension of the statute to the colony (MS R.I. Equity Court Judgment Boo\, sub Nov., 1741, #4-6). 80 MS R.I. Sup. Ct. Jud. Judgment Book., 1747-69. 35- 81 MS Petitions to R.I. General Assembly, 1748-s°, #35- 82 Acts and Laws R. 1., 1745-52 (1752), 70-71.