In the nineteenth century, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council held sway over the lives, liberties and property of more than a quarter of the world's inhabitants.

Countries that have a domestic final appellate court have established a judicial institution over which they have control as part of the policymaking governing structure and how they view other existing and emerging extraterritorial courts will be influenced by their perception of the court and the role it will play when the policies of the governing coalition are challenged. This book analyzes that phenomenon in terms of the broader construction and understanding of the state in the era of international law, legal tribunals, and globalization. By zooming in on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), an ancient colonial court, Harold Young examines how the Caribbean Community, specifically, the 15 former British colonies comprising the Caribbean Basin are navigating their changing political environments and transitioning to its own extraterritorial court, the Caribbean Court of Justice. Using historical reviews, descriptive analyses, and statistical methodologies Young finds that the choice to retain the JCPC at independence is influenced by the colonial experience, the length of colonial rule, and how deeply embedded the JCPC is on the governing structures of the new state.

The eminent legal historian William E. Nelson's magisterial four-volume The Common Law in Colonial America traces how the many legal orders of Britain's thirteen North American colonies gradually evolved into one American system. Initially established on divergent political, economic, and religious grounds, the various colonial systems slowly converged until it became possible by the 1770s to imagine that all thirteen participated in a common American legal order, which diverged in its details but differed far more substantially from English common law. This fourth and final volume begins where volume three ended. It focuses on the laws of the thirteen colonies in the mid-eighteenth century and on constitutional events leading up to the American Revolution. Nelson first examines procedural and substantive law and looks at important shifts in the law to show how the mid-eighteenth- century colonial legal system in large part functioned effectively in the interests both of Great Britain and of its thirteen colonies. Nelson then turns to constitutional events leading to the Revolution. Here he shows how lawyers deployed ideological arguments not for their own sake, but in order to protect colonial institutional structures and the socio-economic interests of their clients. As lawyers deployed the arguments, they developed them into a constitutional theory that gave primacy to common-law constitutional rights and local self-government. In the process, the lawyers became leaders of the revolutionary movement and a dominant political force in the new United States.

Since 1875, Canadian courts have been permitted to act as advisors alongside their ordinary, adjudicative role. This book offers the first detailed examination of that role from a legal perspective. When one thinks of courts, it is most often in the context of deciding cases: live disputes involving spirited, adversarial debate between opposing parties. Sometimes, though, a court is granted the power to answer questions in the absence of such disputes through advisory opinions (also called references). These proceedings raise many questions: about the judicial role, about the relationship between courts and those who seek their 'advice', and about the nature of law. Tracking their use in Canada since the country's Confederation and looking to the experience of other legal systems, the book considers how advisory opinions draw courts into the complex relationship between law and politics. With attention to key themes such as the separation of powers, federalism, rights and precedent, this book provides an important and timely study of a fascinating phenomenon.