Catalogue description Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: Printed Cases in Indian and Colonial Appeals and Printed Papers in Appeals

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Details of PCAP 6
Reference: PCAP 6
Title: Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: Printed Cases in Indian and Colonial Appeals and Printed Papers in Appeals
Description:

This series contains:

  • 'Printed Cases in Indian and Colonial Appeals' (1792 to 1878), including appeals from the Crown Dependencies (Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man);
  • 'Printed Papers in Appeals' (1873 to 2008).

The latter are a continuation of the earlier sequence but with the addition of ecclesiastical (including marital and probate), maritime and prize appeals previously kept in different sequences (see PCAP 2, PCAP 3 and PCAP 13), appeals from professional regulatory bodies and constitutional cases from Scotland. Earlier transfers took place of ecclesiastical and maritime appeals into PCAP 2, whilst the colonial and Indian appeals remained in the Privy Council Office and were later transferred to The National Archives as part of PCAP 6; however, there is sometimes an overlap between the two series.

Each volume contains all cases heard by the Judicial Committee within a given period. For each case, full transcripts of the Appellant's case (occasionally with appendices) and the case on behalf of the Respondent (occasionally with appendices) and the respective Committee Judgments applying to each case are provided. These transcripts comprise the key record of the substance of heard appeals, particularly the evidence and process of the courts appealed from. A printed case can run to many hundred pages of detailed transcripts of exhibits and argument. Other PCAP series provide the administrative background to these and rejected petitions to appeals.

Each catalogue entry includes a regional geographical / typical descriptor to aid searching of appeals by wide area. These descriptors (given here in italics) comprise:

Africa: Alexandria; Basutoland; Bechuanaland Protectorate; Cairo; Cape of Good Hope; Eastern Africa Court of Appeal; Egypt; Gambia; Ghana; Gold Coast Colony; Lagos; Lesotho; Natal; Nigeria; Northern Rhodesia; Port Natal; Rhodesia and Nyasaland; Sierra Leone; Sierra Leone, Vice Admiralty Court; Somaliland; South Africa, Griqualand West; Supreme Court For Egypt; Swaziland; Traansvaal; Uganda; West African Court of Appeal.

Australasia: Australia; New South Wales; New Zealand; Queensland; South Australia; Tasmania; Van Diemen's Land; Victoria; Western Australia.

Caribbean: Anguilla; Antigua; Antigua and Barbuda; the Bahamas; Barbados; Barbuda; Belize; Bermuda; British Guiana; British Honduras; British Virgin Islands; Cayman Islands; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Jamaica; Leeward Islands; St Lucia; St Vincent; Trinidad; Trinidad and Tobago; Turks and Caicos Islands; Windward Islands; Caribbean Court of Appeal; Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court; St Christopher [St Kitts], Nevis and Anguilla; West Indian Court of Appeal; Windward Islands and Leeward Islands; St Vincent Circuit; St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Crown Dependency: Guernsey; Isle of Man; Jersey.

Ecclesiastical: Ecclesiastical, England; Ecclesiastical, Marital; Ecclesiastical, Probate.

Far East: Brunei Darussalam; China; China and Corea [Korea]; China and Japan; Federated Malay States; Hong Kong; Japan; Johore; Malay States; Malaya; Malaysia; Penang; Perak; Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei; Shanghai; Singapore; Straits Settlements.

India: Agra and Oudh; Ajmer; Allahabad; Baluchistan; Bengal; Bihar and Orissa; Bombay; Burma; Calcutta; Central Provinces; Coorg; East India Company; Fort William; Hyderabad (Deccan); India: Lahore; Lower Burma; Lucknow; Madras; Moulmein; Mysore; Nagpur; North West Frontier Province; North Western Provinces; North Western Provinces, Oudh; Oudh; Patna; Punjab; Quetta; Rangoon; Sindh or Sind; Upper Burma

Indian Ocean: Ceylon; Mauritius; Seychelles; Zanzibar; Diocese of Mauritius and the Seychelles.

Mediterranean: Constantinople; Cyprus; Egypt; Gibraltar; Malta; Ottoman Porte; Palestine.

North America: Alberta; British Columbia; Canada; Island of St John in the Gulf of St Lawrence; Lower Canada; Manitoba; Montreal; New Brunswick; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Ontario; Prince Edward Island; Quebec; Saskatchewan; Upper Canada.

Prize (ships captured or seized in wartime).

Professional Standards UK: the General Dental Council; the General Medical Council; the General Optical Council; the Occupational Therapists Board; the Radiographers' Board; the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.

Date: 1792-2008
Arrangement:

For appeals brought before the Judicial Committee after 1870, the volumes of printed or typescript cases are in general arranged chronologically, with each year having several volumes, numbered sequentially within the year. Within volumes, the cases are generally arranged by judgment number. This arrangement varies when prize cases occur, as these were usually bound together, or for reasons of length. Some cases appear not to have been bound, but a description is included in the catalogue under the correct judgment number, as this set of volumes is the master set. The spine of each volume is labelled with the year, judgment numbers and volume number.

Judgment numbers in the catalogue are expressed in the format 'Judgment No 22 of 1955'; this corresponds to the neutral citation '[1955] UKPC 22' used by the courts and by legal publishers.

Cases were initially printed in Imperial Folio [large format], but Demy Octavo [small format] became an option from 1873, with the last Imperial Folio volume produced in 1878. For the intervening years, the volumes ran in parallel, sometimes with a large format case being folded to fit a small format volume, or a small format case hidden within a large format volume. The Imperial Folio volumes had room to contain full printed judgments on blue paper and orders in Council on cream paper, but the small format volumes did not: instead extracts of the actual decision or promulgation were cut out and pasted in. These were not included in the pagination when the volumes were paginated, and so have now been identified as e.g. 125a, 125b etc.

Related material:

Other incomplete collections of duplicate cases exist in the British Library, Lincoln's Inn Library, and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London (IALS).

Held by: The National Archives, Kew
Legal status: Not Public Record(s)
Language: English
Creator:

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1833-

Physical description: 2953 volume(s)
Access conditions: Open unless otherwise stated
Immediate source of acquisition:

From 2019 Ministry of Justice

Custodial history: The records resided in the basement of 12 Downing Street, London, until 2008 when they were removed to the Ministry of Justice storage facility in Branston, Derbyshire.
Selection and destruction information: These records were selected under Section 2.1.4 of TNA's Appraisal Policy, dealing with the administration of justice
Accruals: Series is accruing
Administrative / biographical background:

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is the court of final appeal for the UK overseas territories and Crown Dependencies, and for those Commonwealth countries that have retained the appeal to Her Majesty in Council or, in the case of republics, to the Judicial Committee. The court also has jurisdiction over appeals from medical and veterinary disciplinary bodies and in certain ecclesiastical cases.

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