imes, when the statute book is swelled to ten
times a larger bulk; unless it should be found, that the penners of
our modern statutes have proportionably better informed themselves in
the knowlege of the common law.

[Footnote f: 2 Rep. Pref.]

WHAT is said of our gentlemen in general, and the propriety of their
application to the study of the laws of their country, will hold
equally strong or still stronger with regard to the nobility of this
realm, except only in the article of serving upon juries. But, instead
of this, they have several peculiar provinces of far greater
consequence and concern; being not only by birth hereditary
counsellors of the crown, and judges upon their honour of the lives of
their brother-peers, but also arbiters of the property of all their
fellow-subjects, and that in the last resort. In this their judicial
capacity they are bound to decide the nicest and most critical points
of the law; to examine and correct such errors as have escaped the
most experienced sages of the profession, the lord keeper and the
judges of the courts at Westminster. Their sentence is final,
decisive, irrevocable: no appeal, no correction, not even a review can
be had: and to their determination, whatever it be, the inferior
courts of justice must conform; otherwise the rule of property would
no longer be uniform and steady.

SHOULD a judge in the most subordinate jurisdiction be deficient in
the knowlege of the law, it would reflect infinite contempt upon
himself and disgrace upon those who employ him. And yet the
consequence of his ignorance is comparatively very trifling and small:
his judgment may be examined, and his errors rectified, by other
courts. But how much more serious and affecting is the case of a
superior judge, if without any skill in the laws he will boldly
venture to decide a question, upon which the welfare and subsistence
of whole families may depend! where the chance of his judging right,
or wrong, is barely equal; and where, if he chances to judge wrong, he
does an injury of the most alarming nature, an injury without
possibility of redress!

YET, vast as this trust is, it can no where be so properly reposed as
in the noble hands where our excellent constitution has placed it: and
therefore placed it, because, from the independence of their fortune
and the dignity of their station, they are presumed to employ that
leisure which is the consequence of both, in attaining a more
extensive kn