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Supreme Court, Hongkong,
19th July, 1909.
Sir,
In continuation of my previous letter on the proposal of the Chamber of Commerce that the law as to trial by jury should be amended, I have had prepared a list of cases in which applications for juries have been made, and of those in which it has been refused which I now forward.
2. From the first list Your Excellency will see that the application is not frequently made; from the second that it has only been refused in four cases.
3. As to these, in two of them it would have been quite impossible to have had a trial by jury, because of the mass of accounts and other details involved; and in one of these an assessor was appointed.
One of them might have been tried by a jury, but at the time the order was asked for it seemed most inadvisable to make it, as there appeared to be a possibility that complicated accounts would have to be gone into. And in one of them it could not be granted owing to a technical objection.
5. Your Excellency will see therefore that the case for the alteration of the law put forward by the Chamber is not borne out by the facts.
6. I may add that personally I am not at all unfavourable to juries, though there have been a few cases in which...
His Excellency,
Sir Frederick Lugard, K.C.M.G.,
Governor of Hongkong.
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