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This chapter examines British imperial rule of law and its relationship to colonial difference. The ideal of impartial legality within the British Empire was embodied in a supreme right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a right continues in force even in a few locations today. During its more active periods, the Privy Council saw itself as the instantiation of the idea of rule of law across the empire, and therefore as a profound force toward world-spanning legality and social order. Yet this universal aspiration toward the rule of law did not lead toward simple assertions that all peoples throughout the empire should immediately adopt British social forms. Instead, the judges sought to assimilate existing patterns of social life to a shared juridical order. Theirs was a universalism that did not insist upon the same rights for everyone, regardless of who and where they might be, but rather emphasized the submersion of all local legal orders to the rule of the empire’s central court. As Ibhawoh notes, many of the questions that occupied the Privy Council continue to matter today as developing systems of international law replay many similar, difficult debates.

This chapter considers some of the difficulties in determining what was the law of Pitcairn at the time the offences were committed and tried. The law of Pitcairn is not necessarily the same as the law of England. So it needed to be determined on what basis, if any, the English Sexual Offences Act 1956, under which the defendants were prosecuted, applied to Pitcairn. The criteria for this decision are provided by the common law — the interaction of the common law and Acts of the UK Parliament is thus crucial to the question. And this in turn raises the questions whether the common law is the same in whatever jurisdiction it operates, and to what extent the common law itself is ‘customary law’, and whether, alongside the common law, a system of customary law can operate. The chapter expands on the point that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was prepared to accept the statement by the Crown as to the status of Pitcairn as a settled colony, exploring the implications if the judges had taken a less deferential line on this. It discusses the abuse of process point, taking on the ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ doctrine.

This chapter analyzes the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), the creation of which was regarded as the culmination of the Caribbean’s long and protracted process toward independence from its former colonizers. Formally, the CCJ was instantaneously empowered to hear cases involving Caribbean Community law (Community law). The CCJ was also empowered to replace the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in London—a last court of appeal for civil and criminal cases from the Caribbean and the most visible remnant of the British Empire’s former rule. The CCJ’s unique double jurisdiction—original over Community law and appellate over other civil and criminal matters—underscores the complex sociopolitical context and transformation of which it is a part. Ultimately, the CCJ’s growing authority has increasingly made the Court the institutional intersection for the convergence of these two different paths toward establishing the Caribbean as a legally integrated regional unity.