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THE SUPREME COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA.
By Owen Wister.
I.
COLONIAL PERIOD.
This tribunal was created in 1684, some time after it had become needed. There had been courts in the Province for eleven years by this time, but none of appeals. The judges in these other courts had not been lawyers. They were laymen, with as much native judiciousness and as little ignorance as could be procured in a community somewhat shifting and adventurous, and numbering no lawyers as yet. Nor did the dearth of these stop in 1684. By 1739, scarcity and prejudice had caused ten laymen, doctors and merchants, to be at different times commissioned as Chief Justices of Pennsylvania.
Before there were any courts on the Delaware at all, — and that was a long day, lasting from 1624, when Cornelis Jacobsen May was Director of New Netherlands, until 1673, the time of Peter Alricks, Deputy Governor on the west side of the Delaware, — New York was headquarters for the Province. Any differences that the pioneer colonists might pause to settle by litigation were of necessity carried to that place. But differences between gentlemen of nomadic bent are likely to be of a too personal rapidity for cure by law, and it is probable that Manhattan was not perceptibly occupied with their cases till Directors on the Delaware began to be frequent, — or after 1655, the time of Dirck Smidt. Did the limits of the present paper permit our dwelling upon that part of the legal history of Pennsylvania when to "deny the true God and his Attributes" was punishable by death, and to tell a lie in conversation, or to "Smoak tobacco in the Streets either by day or by night," or to countenance by one's presence "such rude and riotous sports and practices as Prizes, Stage-plays, Masques, Revels, Bull baitings, Cock-fightings with such like," incurred penalties not unsevere, a portrait of Justice attired in her colonial quaintness might be accurately drawn. Such, with more of the kind, were the checks put upon the habits and diversions of citizens under the provincial government of James, Duke of York, and the Proprietary that followed in 1682. We read at the same time that "Every Person Licensed to keep an Ordinary shall always be provided of strong and wholsome Beer," — an ordinance that goes a little toward tempering the wind of the preceding mandates. But starting with the year 1673, when the County Courts came into being, we must travel with reluctant haste over the picturesque chaos out of which the Supreme Court finally grew into shape, else that later period will not be reached.
These primitive tribunals decided "all matters under twenty pounds without appeal." In the graver criminal cases of "Life, Limbo, and Banishment," there was an appeal to the Court of Assizes in New York. Under the Quakers, no man was allowed to "plead in any Civill Causes of another" for a fee past, present, or to come, and was fined five pounds if he did so. As has been said, none of the judges were professional lawyers, and juries were limited to half-a-dozen men with a majority verdict, save in capital cases. Under the Proprietary Government the highly irregular procedure of these courts acquired a modicum of for mality. Acts were passed (1683, 1690, and 1693) confirming their jurisdiction, in Debt, Account, Slander, Trespass, possessory actions, and others relating to title. The province of their power spread in sundry directions; among which may be instanced
