Court of Chancery

Also it has been established by various decisions in the Court of Chancery that “an infant cannot take advantage of his own fraud:

The operation of the Statute of Limitation is further subject to the exception of concealed fraud, derived from the doctrine and practice of the Court of Chancery, which, whether it thought itself bound by the terms of the statute, or only acted in analogy to it, considerably modified its literal application.

Again, the jurisdiction of courts of equity in these matters has always been said to be founded on fraud.

At the time, further, when the common law courts made oral evidence the basis of their inquiries, but deprived this mode of investigation of half its worth by excluding from the witness-box the parties to the cause, who naturally knew most about the truth, the Court of Chancery allowed a plaintiff to search the conscience of the defendants, and the defendants, by a cross bill, to perform a similar …

The Court of Chancery, which towards the middle of the nineteenth century was still a byword for dilatoriness and technicality, was, even before the passing of the Judicature Act, 1873, reformed to a great extent, though in a partial and fragmentary manner, by legislation subsequent to 1850.

A time, in the second place, inevitably arrived when judicial legislation had reached its final limits, and the reform accomplished by the Court of Chancery was thus marked by incompleteness.

it ceased to be an engine of royal tyranny and was never issued except as part of the process of a litigation pending in the Court of Chancery.

and their jurisdiction required a supplement, which was supplied by the genesis of the Court of Chancery, dispensing, not common law, but equity, which professed to give (and, for a short time, actually did give) redress on the merits of each case as it arose, unrestrained by precedents and legal subtleties.

“Our lord the King does not intend to divest himself of so great an advantage, which has been continually in use in Chancery as well before as after the making of the said charter, in the time of all his noble progenitors who have been kings of England.

The common law treatises on pleading, down to Stephen inclusive, do not so much as mention the Courts of Chancery or Admiralty.

a foreign observer might even have expected that the Court of Chancery, not yet officially declared to be an ordinary court of justice, would easily be drawn into the confederacy.

The later orthodox doctrine, from any scientific point of view quite as arbitrary as the prerogative claims it displaced, was that this royal power or duty had exhausted itself in the establishment of the Court of Chancery, and that the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber, or rather of the king’s Council in the Star Chamber, was lawful only so far as it was created or confirmed by statute.

In the court of Chancery, two cases have recently occurred, which may serve as an illustration of the extnet in which the taxes upon law proceedings may operate as a denial of justice, In one case—Roe v.

and to return the inquests so taken into the Court of Chancery, and that all and every the Sheriffs and Bailiffs of and in every County wherein any such inquests shall be so to be taken;

Whereas upon pretext of an ancient custom or usage of this realm of England, that men of full age being not Knights, and being seized of lands or rents of the yearly value of forty pounds or more (especially if their seizen had so continued by the space of three years next past), might be compelled by the King’s writ to receive, or take upon them the Order of Knighthood, or else to make fine for t …

, if a Roman Catholic refused to allow his Protestant child a fitting maintenance, with a view to compel him to change his religion, the Court of Chancery might compel him to do what was “just and reasonable.