PRACTICE BELOW.
Your Committee, not having learned that the resolutions of the Judges
(by which the Lords have been guided) were supported by any authority in
law to which they could have access, have heard by rumor that they have
been justified upon the practice of the courts in ordinary trials by
commission of Oyer and Terminer. To give any legal precision to this
term of _practice_, as thus applied, your Committee apprehends it must
mean, that the judge in those criminal trials has so regularly rejected
a certain kind of evidence, when offered there, that it is to be
regarded in the light of a case frequently determined by legal
authority. If such had been discovered, though your Committee never
could have allowed these precedents as rules for the guidance of the
High Court of Parliament, yet they should not be surprised to see the
inferior judges forming their opinions on their own confined practice.
Your Committee, in their inquiry, has found comparatively few reports of
criminal trials, except the collection under the title of "State
Trials," a book compiled from materials of very various authority; and
in none of those which we have seen is there, as appears to us, a single
example of the rejection of evidence similar to that rejected by the
advice of the Judges in the House of Lords.
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