See also
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
| Campbell v Hall | |
|---|---|
| Court | Court of King's Bench (England) |
| Full case name | James Campbell (Plaintiff) v. William Hall (Defendant) |
| Decided | Michaelmas Term, 1774 |
| Citation | [1774] EngR 5, (1774) 1 Cowp 204, 98 ER 1045 |
| Court membership | |
| Judges sitting | Lord Mansfield, C.J., Aston, Willes, and Ashhurst, JJ. |
| Case opinions | |
| Decision by | Lord Mansfield, C.J. |
| Keywords | |
| law applicable in colonies; extent of Royal prerogative therein; role of Parliament in this field; where authority of colonial legislatures begins | |
Campbell v Hall(1774)1 Cowp 204, 98 ER 1045 was a case decided in the Court of King's Bench in 1774. On its face it was a private action for recovery of sums paid to a tax agent, but the decision laid down the principles of the King's constitutional authority in a British colony, deciding amongst other things that such authority is absolute until a representative assembly is granted, at which point the authority of the Crown is limited.
The matter was first heard in the Mayor's and City of London Court, which court found a special verdict and remitted it to the Court of King's Bench, which then heard the claim on a matter of law.
The decision turned on the validity of a tax imposed in Grenada. This was the trigger for an examination of the constitutional position of Grenada and for a review of the position in all British territories.
The political situation at the time of the judgment was interesting too; this was the time of the tax rebellion in the American colonies (including the West Indies) and was indeed two years before the American Declaration of Independence. The judgment therefore had the potential to cause political trouble.
Lord Mansfield's judgment looked beyond the narrow facts of the case. He reviewed the law applicable to British colonies in general and laid down a series of important points of constitutional law applicable to British possessions.
Grenada was conquered from the French and formally ceded to Great Britain in 1763. The King issued a proclamation dated 7 October 1763 that all governors of the newly acquired colonies were instructed "as soon as the state and circumstances of the said colonies will admit" to call a general assembly. On 9 April 1764, the King (George III) appointed a Governor, General Melville.
Finally, on 24 July 1764 (before Melville had set sail for Grenada) letters patent were issued to impose a four and a half per cent duty upon all goods and sugars exported from the island of Grenada, to equalise the duty across the Leeward Islands. Melville arrived in Grenada on 14 December 1764. In 1765 he summoned an assembly.
James Campbell bought a plantation on Grenada. William Hall was a collector of the four and a half per cent duty. Campbell brought a claim to recover from Hall the money he had paid as duty. Campbell claimed that 4½% duty had not been imposed by lawful or sufficient authority.
Campbell succeeded, the decision turning on important constitutional principles.
Lord Mansfield CJ held:
Lord Mansfield's judgment reaffirmed the authority of the king to make law and impose taxation upon a colony by his own authority. In addition to past judicial pronouncements (of which few were found) he examined historical sources. In particular he found that the sovereign ruled freely by charter and decree in Ireland until its own parliament was founded, Wales until its annexation, Berwick-upon-Tweed until the days of James I and in Calais until its loss, and that power remained unchallenged in other extant British colonies.
However, in contrast in Jamaica, which had a representative assembly, it had been previously decided that a governor could not override a troublesome assembly. Just as in Great Britain the King was restrained by Parliament, the Governor had no power to force laws or taxes on a colony without the consent of its assembly. Only an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain could do that.
Lord Mansfield recognised that the 4½% duty was fair and equitable, even desirable to avoid distorting trade between the Windward Islands. Nevertheless, he ruled it unlawful. Notwithstanding the Crown's wide authority, where a colony has a representative assembly, taxation cannot be imposed without its consent or by Act of Parliament.
In this case, the letters patent of 24 July 1764 predated by some months the existence of the assembly. Nevertheless, Lord Mansfield held that the requirement to call the assembly was in the King's proclamation of 9 April 1764. Therefore, the King's absolute authority ended on that date, notwithstanding that the assembly had not been called and indeed the governor who was to call it had not even left Britain:
Through the inattention of the king's servants in inverting the order in which the instruments should have passed and been notoriously published, the last act is contradictory to and a violation of the first, and is, therefore, void.
Campbell v. Hall has been cited or referred to in several later cases in the British Empire. Most pointedly it was cited with approval in West Rand Central Gold Mining Company, Limited v. The King, [1] a case which concerned the conquest of the Transvaal and the consequential extinction of the vanquished state's obligations. Its principles were also discussed and distinguished with respect to colonies acquired otherwise than by conquest, by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in its 1938 ruling in Sammut v. Strickland. [2]
It was also argued in 2008 in R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State For Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (also known as the Chagos Islanders case), where Lord Hoffmann, in introducing his opinion, stated:
Authority for these propositions will be found in Lord Mansfield’s judgment in Campbell v Hall (1774) 1 Cowp 204 (“no question was ever started before, but that the King has a right to a legislative authority over a conquered country.”) This appeal requires your Lordships to determine the limits of that power. [3]
He resumed later:
Although the passage from the judgment of Lord Mansfield has regularly been cited for the proposition that the King cannot legislate contrary to fundamental principles of that kind, I suspect that this is to read too much into his remark. The passage may be more readily understood if the punctuation is modernised in this way: The 6th and last proposition is that, if the King (and when I say the King, I always mean the King without the concurrence of Parliament) has a power to alter the old and to introduce new laws in a conquered country, this legislation being subordinate, that is, subordinate to his own authority in Parliament, he cannot make any new change contrary to fundamental principles: he cannot exempt an inhabitant from that particular dominion, as for instance, from the laws of trade, or from the power of Parliament, or give him privileges exclusive of his other subjects; and so in many other instances which might be put." [4]
Campbell v Hall also called into question the ouster of French law in Quebec by proclamation in 1763. As a result, the Quebec Act was passed in 1774 to confirm that French law continued to govern civil matters, but was ousted in favour of English law in criminal matters.
Parliament subsequently passed the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 to deal with conflicting jurisprudence that arose in the years following Campbell.
The Continental Congress was a series of legislative bodies, with some executive function, for the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain in North America, and the newly declared United States before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress refers to both the First and Second Congresses of 1774–1781 and at the time, also described the Congress of the Confederation of 1781–1789. The Confederation Congress operated as the first federal government until being replaced following ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Until 1785, the Congress met predominantly at what is today Independence Hall in Philadelphia, though it was relocated temporarily on several occasions during the Revolutionary War and the fall of Philadelphia.
The Quebec Act, 1774 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which set procedures of governance in the Province of Quebec. One of the principal components of the Act was the expansion of the province's territory to take over part of the Indian Reserve, including much of what is now southern Ontario, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota.
The House of Burgesses was the elected representative element of the Virginia General Assembly, the legislative body of the Colony of Virginia.
Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, PC was an English lawyer, judge and Whig politician who was first to hold the title of Earl Camden. As a lawyer and judge he was a leading proponent of civil liberties, championing the rights of the jury, and limiting the powers of the State in leading cases such as Entick v Carrington.
The Stamp Act Congress, also known as the Continental Congress of 1765, was a meeting held in New York City in the colonial Province of New York. It included representatives from most of the British colonies in North America, which sought a unified strategy against newly imposed taxes by the British Parliament, particularly the Stamp Act. It was the second such gathering of elected colonial representatives after the Albany Convention of 1754 at the outbreak of the French and Indian War. Massive debts from that war, which ended in 1763, prompted the British Parliament to implement measures to raise revenues from the colonies. The Stamp Act required the use of specialty stamped British paper for all legal documents, newspapers, almanacks, and calendars, and even playing cards and dice. When in force, it would have an impact on practically all business in the colonies, starting on November 1, 1765. Resistance to it came especially from lawyers and businessmen, but was broadly protested by ordinary colonial residents.
"No taxation without representation" is a political slogan that originated in the American Revolution and which expressed one of the primary grievances of the American colonists for Great Britain. In short, many colonists believed that as they were not represented in the distant British parliament, any taxes it imposed on the colonists were unconstitutional and were a denial of the colonists' rights as Englishmen since the Magna Carta.
The constitutional history of Canada begins with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in which France ceded most of New France to Great Britain. Canada was the colony along the St Lawrence River, part of present-day Ontario and Quebec. Its government underwent many structural changes over the following century. In 1867 Canada became the name of the new federal Dominion extending ultimately from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Arctic coasts. Canada obtained legislative autonomy from the United Kingdom in 1931, and had its constitution patriated in 1982. Canada's constitution includes the amalgam of constitutional law spanning this history.
In many Commonwealth jurisdictions, the phrase "peace, order, and good government" (POGG) is an expression used in law to express the legitimate objects of legislative powers conferred by statute. The phrase appears in many Imperial Acts of Parliament and Letters Patent, most notably the constitutions of Barbados, Canada, Australia and formerly New Zealand and South Africa.
Slavery at common law in the British Empire developed slowly over centuries, and was characterised by inconsistent decisions and varying rationales for the treatment of slavery, the slave trade, and the rights of slaves and slave owners. Unlike in its colonies, within the home islands of Britain, until 1807, except for statutes facilitating and taxing the international slave trade, there was virtually no legislative intervention in relation to slaves as property, and accordingly the common law had something of a "free hand" to develop, untrammelled by the "paralysing hand of the Parliamentary draftsmen". Two attempts to pass a slave code via Parliament itself both failed, one in the 1660s and the other in 1674.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of essays written by the Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson (1732–1808) and published under the pseudonym "A Farmer" from 1767 to 1768. The twelve letters were widely read and reprinted throughout the Thirteen Colonies, and were important in uniting the colonists against the Townshend Acts in the run-up to the American Revolution. According to many historians, the impact of the Letters on the colonies was unmatched until the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. The success of the letters earned Dickinson considerable fame.
The Provincial Congresses were extra-legal legislative bodies established in ten of the Thirteen Colonies early in the American Revolution. Some were referred to as congresses while others used different terms for a similar type body. These bodies were generally renamed or replaced with other bodies when the provinces declared themselves states.
The constitution of the United Kingdom comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, no official attempt has been made to codify such arrangements into a single document, thus it is known as an uncodified constitution. This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched.
R v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex parte Bancoult [2008] UKHL 61 is a UK constitutional law case in the House of Lords concerning the removal of the Chagos Islanders and the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. The Chagos Islands, acquired by the United Kingdom in 1814, were reorganised as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) in 1965 for the purpose of removing its inhabitants. Under a 1971 ordinance, the Chagossians were forcibly removed, and the central island of Diego Garcia leased to the United States for use as a military outpost.
The Braintree Instructions was a document sent on September 24, 1765 by the town meeting of Braintree, Massachusetts to the town's representative at the Massachusetts General Court, or legislature, which instructed the representative to oppose the Stamp Act, a tax regime which had recently been adopted by the British Parliament in London. The document is significant because, following the Virginia Resolves, it was among the earliest in British America to officially reject the authority of Parliament over the colonies in North America. The instructions were written by John Adams, who would ten years later become a key figure in the American Revolution and ultimately be elected the second President of the United States in 1796.
Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale. According to one reported version of the case, Lord Mansfield decided that:
The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.
The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity recognized in common law as belonging to the sovereign, and which have become widely vested in the government. It is the means by which some of the executive powers of government, possessed by and vested in a monarch with regard to the process of governance of the state, are carried out.
The Petition to His Majesty, The Memorial to the House of Lords and The Remonstrance to the House of Commons, commonly referred to collectively as the 1768 Petition, Memorial and Remonstrance (PMR), are a series of imprints that record a protest by the Virginia House of Burgesses in April 1768 that was sent to the British government by then-acting Lieutenant Governor John Blair.
The 27 grievances is a section from the United States Declaration of Independence. The Second Continental Congress's Committee of Five drafted the document listing their grievances with the actions and decisions of King George III with regard to the Colonies in North America. The Second Continental Congress voted unanimously to adopt and issue the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
The First North Carolina Provincial Congress was the first of five extra-legal unicameral bodies that met beginning in the summer of 1774. They were modeled after the colonial lower house. These congresses created a government structure, issued bills of credit to pay for the movement, and organized an army for defense, in preparation for the state of North Carolina. This First Congress met in New Bern from August 25 to August 27, 1774. John Harvey served as president. These Provincial congresses paved the way for the first meeting of the North Carolina General Assembly on April 7, 1777 in New Bern, North Carolina.