advantageous. It was now necessary to replace them by American
courts of last resort, and it was not difficult in doing so to
improve upon the English model. The time had come for
separating, as far as it could conveniently be accomplished,
judicial from political power.

Virginia was the first to act. A few days before the Declaration
of Independence she adopted a Constitution (under which the
government, was carried on until 1830, though it was never
formally submitted to or ratified by the people) providing for a
separate judiciary headed by a Supreme Court of Appeals whose
judges should hold office during good behavior, and be ineligible
to the Privy Council or General Assembly.

This divorce of judiciary and legislature was not the plan
universally followed.

New Jersey, in which as a colony the Governor and Council had
possessed an appellate power like that vested in the English
House of Lords, was so well satisfied with this arrangement as to
continue it in her Constitution of July 3, 1776, and up to the
present time puts upon her Supreme Court a certain number of
judges who give but a part of their time to this work, and are
not necessarily (though in practice of late years they generally
have been) lawyers.

New York, in her Constitution of 1777, pursued a somewhat similar
plan. Her highest court was one "for the trials of impeachments
and the correction of errors." Its members were the Senate with
the Chancellor and judges of the Supreme Court. When a judgment