COPY.
No. 7.
Sir,
Enclosure 1.
Rec
C
23462
IR. 29 JUN 06
Chambers, Supreme Court,
Hongkong, 20th. March, 1906.
136
Excellency
1.
I have the honour to invite Your Excel-
-lency's attention to the necessity of increasing the number of
Judges of the Supreme Court. The question is I believe not a new
one, though I am not sure that it has as yet been put into
concrete form. At the end of the summer term last year I was
much concerned at the difficulty in which I constantly found
myself in making satisfactory arrangements for the conduct of the
business of the Supreme Court. I thought it advisable however to
delay making any report to Your Excellency on the subject until
I had further experience of the working of the present system,
and I have now come to the conclusion that the appointment of a
Third Judge is unavoidable.
2.
the
it is generally assumed that there are at
present two Judges of the Supreme Court. This however is a most
misleading way of stating the case. The Court, as a Court of
First Instance, is divided into two distinct jurisdictions
'Summary' and what is termed the 'Original'. There is no small
Debts Court independent of the Supreme Court, such as the County
Courts in England or the District Courts in some of the Colonies.
The jurisdiction of the Summary Court goes up to $1,000 and is
entrusted to the Puisne Judge. This has, it is true, the result
of taking from the Original Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court a
considerable number of important cases which would otherwise
come before it, but it includes also the mass of small cases which
Sir Matthew Nathan, K.C.M.C.,
Governor and Commander-in-Chief.