the house of lords as a court of appeal 1 McQueen, John F. 1842 p. 1. 176 ven in theselatter days of restlessly globe-trotting academia, Professor Modéer’s very kind invitation to participate in the symposium convened to mark the 400th anniversary of the Svea E Court of Appeal came as a wholly unexpected and delightful surprise. I was and remain most grateful for the opportunity which it has offered to learn more about courts of appeal in early modern Sweden and Europe generally, as also to think about the appellate functions of England’s – and from the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, Britain’s – House of Lords in an explicitly comparative context. This has brought a considerably broader perspective to my research on the judicial role of the early modern House of Lords, in connection with the forthcoming volume of the Oxford History of the Laws of England devoted to the period 1689-1760. But you might well wonder, as I did initially, whether such an excursion into the now deservedly fashionable field of comparative legal history could really be justified. For at first sight there seems little common ground between courts of appeal in the continental European tradition and what a British writer of the mid-nineteenth century would term “that supereminent tribunal which we distinguish by the title of the High Court of Parliament.”1 Three obvious points of difference present themselves. In the first place, it is commonly observed that appeals played very different roles in early modern civil law and common law systems. To put it crudely, reviews of decisions in lesser tribunals of first instance by superior jurisdictions were a routine occurrence in those legal systems which drew upon the corpus juris civilis, but almost completely unknown to England’s common law. Secondly, the House of Lords is an institution of considerable antiquity, dating back to at least the High Middle Introduction
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