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xviii
PREFACE
Lord Mansfield, and [1] travel out of the record. When law and reason speak plainly, we do not want authority to direct our
- ↑ The following quotation from a speech delivered by Lord Chatham, on the 11th of December, 1770, is taken with exactness. The reader will find it curious in itself, and very fit to be inserted here. "My lords, the verdict, given in Woodfall's trial was, guilty of printing and publishing ONLY; upon which two motions were made in court;—one, in arrest of judgment, by the defendant's counsel, grounded upon the ambiguity of the verdict;—the other, by the counsel for the crown, for a rule upon the defendant, to show cause why the verdict should not be entered up according to the legal import of the words. On both motions a rule was granted; and soon after the matter was argued before the court of king's bench. The noble judge, when he delivered the opinion of the court upon the verdict, went regularly through the whole of the proceedings at Nisi Prius, as well the evidence that had been given, as his own charge to the jury. This proceeding would have been very proper, had a motion been made on either side for a new trial; because either a verdict given contrary to evidence, or an improper charge by the judge at Nisi Prius, is held to he a sufficient ground for granting a new trial. But when a motion is made in arrest of judgment, or for establishing the verdict, by entering it up according to the legal import of the words, it must be on the ground of something appearing on the face of the record; and the court in considering [xiv] whether the verdict shall be established or not, are so confined to the record, that they cannot take notice of any thing that does not appear on the face of it; in the legal phrase, they cannot travel out of the record. The noble judge did travel out of the record: and I affirm, that his discourse was irregular, extrajudicial, and unprecedented. His apparent motive for doing what he "knew to be wrong, was that he might have an opportunity of telling the public extrajudicially, that the other three judges concurred in the doctrine laid down in his charge."
