X 
CONCLUSION 
A final estimate of the Privy Council's work as an appellate tribunal depends 
largely upon the criteria of judgment. A distinguished legal historian has remarked 
that "not only did the Council by its decisions on matters of law tend 
to keep the development of the law on the right lines, it also helped to keep 
the administration of justice pure." x This seems in the face of the record exemplified 
in this volume a less-than-fitting epitaph, even if one shares the 
Blackstonian plerophory that the pronouncements of the courts at Westminster 
possessed innate perfection, and entertained equally romantic views 
of the eighteenth century standards of public morality. The appeal jurisdiction 
deserves, however, to be submitted to tests more exacting. Since the Council 
functioned as a court, and as a supreme court, its activities must be assessed 
in the light of what contemporarily the role of a court of last resort was conceived 
to be—was this role confined to the determination of the mere matter 
in controversy or did it extend more broadly to embrace a duty to maintain 
and expound the law, and beyond these limits was it charged also with a 
political responsibility not strictly judicial? 
Up to the time of the American Revolution there had been but the slightest 
critical analysis of judicial functions of review in general, for writing about 
courts where it was not tuned in the medieval key of describing jurisdiction 
was mostly plainsong on the theme laus legum Angliae. What today is subsumed 
under the term "appellate power" was still in the Age of Enlightenment 
a matter of particularization dependent upon the nature of the writ and 
record by which a cause was brought before a superior tribunal. The review 
of either a common law or a chancery case was conceived as a new proceeding, 
but with this important difference, that the common law proceeding was confined 
to the correction of errors, whereas the chancery appeal was extended 
to a virtual rehearing. The basis of review power in England was traditionally 
a conception of superintendence of inferior jurisdictions, and hence in an instant 
cause it was less the interests of the parties than the setting right of mistakes 
below which was the charge of the superior tribunal. This explains, of 
course, the immense preoccupation of courts handling errors or appeals with 
correct statements of the law and its exposition beyond even the necessities 
of a particular controversy. In the notion of superintendence is also to be found 
1 ii Holdsworth, HEL, 101.