Ellis Bent - Legal Reform in The Colony

Legal Reform in The Colony

Bent made recommendations to Lord Bathurst concerning the administration of justice in the colony. Some of these related to the introduction of jury trial in the colony and the creation of a new superior court to deal with civil matters. For this latter court, he proposed that a judge be appointed to sit with two magistrates.

Macquarie recommended that the plan be adopted and suggested to the English authorities that Bent should be made the first judge of any such court created. Bent was passed over for the position, and instead it was offered to his brother Jeffrey Bent. The establishment of this latter court, the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature (commonly referred to as the Supreme Court) lessened the workload of Bent as the Court of Civil Jurisdiction over which he presided was abolished as a result of the establishment of that Supreme Court.

Bent was quite progressive for the time. He allowed ex-convict lawyers to appear before his court when such a course was not possible in England under English law. He did this was allowing them to appear as agents of the parties, rather than formally admitting the lawyers as officers of the court. This met with general approval in the colony as it was a practical solution which facilitated the application of justice in the colony at a time when the colony was in its infancy. It has to be remembered that Bent was the first lawyer to emigrate to the colony of his own free will.

Read more about this topic:  Ellis Bent

Famous quotes containing the words legal, reform and/or colony:

    The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.
    —Alison Neilans. “Justice for the Prostitute—Lady Astor’s Bill,” Equal Rights (September 19, 1925)

    “Tall tales” were told of the sociability of the Texans, one even going so far as to picture a member of the Austin colony forcing a stranger at the point of a gun to visit him.
    —Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)