The English Law Courts. Admiralty Courts. In the meantime it may suffice to say that, like his brother, Lord Chancellor Truro, he has been both a care.ful administrator and an able expounder of legal principles. At the present day, per haps the most striking figure in the Privy Council (or in the House of Lords) is Lord Watson. For many years at the Scotch bar, to which he belongs, for his connection with
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takes part. Not only in Scotch, but in Eng lish and Irish appeals to the House of Lords, and in Indian and colonial appeals and pat ent petitions to the Privy Council, Lord Wat son has displayed a versatility of intellect and a power of mastering and expounding the principles and the practice of legal systems, in which by the very necessity of the thing he was absolutely unlearned at the date of
DOWNING STREET, LONDON (IN WHICH THE PRIVY COUNCIL IS SITUATED). the English bar is titular, Mr. Watson, as he then was, proved a somewhat indifferent success. As Lord Advocate under the Con servative government he prosecuted the poi soner Chantrelle, and also the City of Glas gow Bank directors, with ability. On the death of Lord Gordon, he was promoted in 1878 to the House of Lords as a lord of appeal in ordinary, and since that date he has acquired an almost unique position both in that tribunal and in the Judicial Com mittee, in whose deliberations he usually
his promotion to the bench of the supreme tribunal. To say that he is the first Scotch, or Irish law lord who has been a notable figure in the House of Lords or Privy Coun cil is the truth, but far from the whole truth. Lord Watson has been for some years, and is still the dominant spirit in both tribunals, and he is certainly the judge with whom counsel fear most to grapple. A position so commanding has not, of course, been left unassailed by hostile critics; and Scottish legal fledglings, peeping down over the rim
