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The Chief Justice of Munster was the senior of the two judges who assisted the Lord President of Munster in judicial matters: despite the judge's title of Chief Justice, full judicial authority was actually vested in the Lord President, who "had power to hear and determine at his discretion all manner of complaints in any part of the province of Munster", and also had powers of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery. ==Role of the Chief Justice of Munster== The hearing of judicial business in the province of Munster was delegated by the President to the Chief Justice and second justice, who were members of the President's council and always travelled with him on circuit. In the court' s earlier years, it seems that there was no central judicial seat: the court could be convened wherever the President thought it necessary. Due to the chronic disturbances in Elizabethan Munster the office could be a hazardous one: there was a serious riot in Tralee in 1579 in which several officials were reported to have been killed. In 1601-2, during the crisis surrounding the Battle of Kinsale, the Lord President's Court temporarily assumed the powers of the courts of common law. In 1620 one of the judges of the Court recorded that "when the President goeth forth, he is attended in military form, when he rideth, by a troop of horse (cavalry), when he walketh by a company of foot (infantry) with pikes and muskets". The width of the powers given to the President's court led to clashes with the more long-established courts, especially the Court of Chancery (Ireland). In 1622 a sharp instruction was issued to the Court of Munster, and its fellow court in Connacht, not to "intermeddle" with cases which were properly the business of another court. By 1620, according to Luke Gernon, second justice of Munster, the Court had a permanent seat in Limerick, where it held sessions in King John's Castle. In his interesting manuscript, ''A Discourse of Ireland 1620'', Gernon states that the Court was modeled on the Council of Wales and the Marches, with "a President, two justices and a council. We sit in council at a table". The office of Chief Justice of Munster was an onerous one, and it was generally considered inadvisable to combine it with any other senior judicial position: William Saxey aroused much indignation in 1599 when he refused to resign on being appointed to the Court of King's Bench (Ireland), especially as he apparently never sat in the latter Court. On the other hand, it was understood that the office holder could expect to be promoted in due course to one of the courts of common law, and possibly become Chief Justice, as James Dowdall, Sir Nicholas Walsh and Lord Sarsfield did. An exception to the ban on holding two offices at once seems to have been made for Gerald Comerford, who was appointed both Chief Justice of Munster and a Baron of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) shortly before his death in 1604: this was probably his reward for his 20 years of loyal service to the Crown, his lack of a proper reward being a subject about which he had complained frequently over the years. There was apparently no objection to holding a purely local judicial office at the same time: Henry Gosnold, through much of his long career, was also the Admiralty judge for Munster. This was at the time the only local section of the Irish Admiralty Court: the judge in Munster was a deputy to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, acting in his role as the Irish Admiralty judge. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chief Justice of Munster」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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