importance, reversed.[Footnote: See Paper on Appeals to the Lords
of Trade from Colonial Courts, by Harold D. Hazeltine, Report of
the American Historical Association for 1894, 299.] This
revisory jurisdiction, though questioned and occasionally evaded
or thwarted by the colonial governments, became solidly
established long before the Revolution.[Footnote: "Two Centuries'
Growth of American Law," 12, 18, 264.] In but one case did a
colonial court formally ignore a judgment of reversal. This was
in 1738, when the Superior Court of Judicature of Massachusetts,
at its sittings in York County, in what is now the State of
Maine, disobeyed an order of the King in Council made on appeal
from one of its judgments, and when it was repeated a year later,
adhered to its original position.[Footnote: Frost
_v._ Leighton, Publications of the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts, III, 246.] The amount involved was trifling, and
the Lords of Trade and Plantations made no further effort to
enforce their order.

The natural effect of this court of appeal at London was to keep
the public proceedings of the colonies in line with the common
law of England, so far as related to its fundamental principles.

A certain uniformity of result was thus secured. American law,
in its substantial framework, was not allowed to vary from
English law in any case where agreement was reasonably
practicable. There was a central power at London ever ready to
enforce the charter rule. The colonial courts, if their
judgments were to stand, must proceed in conformity to the
British constitution. Justice must be administered by due course
of law, and to find out what that due course was the judges were