WORKERS IN THE LAW

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 97, 26 April 1930, Page 7

WORKERS IN THE LAW

FELLOWSHIP WITH ENGLISH DOMINION SOCIETY’S OPINION [ Per Press Association. J AUCKLAND, April 23. ‘■As a profession, we must suffer if severed from our fellowship with English won. rs in the law,’’ said Mr J. B. Callan of Dunedin, in the course of an address on “The Appea. to the Privy Council,” at the annual conference of the New Zealand Law Society this morning. “Such severance would, in turn, be the ultimate result of severance from any court of appeal manned by English judges, a specific instance of which i s the judicial committee of the Privy Council,’’ he said. The following resolution was carried: ‘That this conference, representative of the whole of the legal profession resolves that the retention of the final right of appeal to his Majesty in Council is in the best interests of the Dominion of New Zealand and of the administration of justice therein-” r HARBOUR EXCURSION LAW DINNER HELD I Per Press Association. J AUCKLAND, April 23. The annual conference of the New’ Zealand Law Society was continued today. Considerable discussion took place on the question of holding future conferences annually as meetings of the Society under the Law Practitioners’ Act. It was decided to defer the mat ter until the next meeting which is to be held in Dunedin next year. Delegates, accompanied by their wives, were taken for a harbour excursion this afternoon and in the evening the law dinner was held.

“FINEST IN WORLD” PRIVY COUNCIL JRIBUNAL A PLEA FOR RETENTION AUCKLAND, April 22. “There is at the present time in certain parts of the British Dominions a desire, amounting almost to a determination to get rid of the Privy Council as the ultimate appellant tribunal,” said Sir Michael Myers, Chief Justice of New Zealand, in hig inaugural address at the Law Conference this morning. Sir Michael said he did not consider this was a live question in New Zealand. There was no desire in New Zealand, he thought, to bring about such a drastic change, and he hoped the system would forever remain as it was. The Privy Council, he continued, was the finest tribunal in the world. Its judgments were the work of the finest minds of the Empire and there was complete freedom from that unconscious local bias which, try how he would, man in a small country found it difficult to avoid. A suggestion had been made at iiome several years ago that the Privy Council should become an itinerant body, going around the British Dominions. That, considered Sir Michael, would be a retrograde step, and he was also able in 1926 to convince one of the British judges of the unwisdom of such a step. Personally he could think of no greater conception than that of appeal—because that was really what it was—to the fountain head of justice, to the King himself. It was the one last remaining tangible link between Great Britain and the dominions oversea, and he hoped it would so remain. Sir Michael suggested that a resolution passed by the Conference would tend to strengthen the hands of delegates to the next Prime Ministers* conference.