Boston College Law School Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School Boston College Law School Faculty Papers 11-2016 The Relevance of Colonial Appeals to the Privy Council Mary Sarah Bilder Boston College Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/lsfp Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Mary Sarah Bilder. "The Relevance of Colonial Appeals to the Privy Council." Texts and Contexts in Legal History: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue (2016): 413-428. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Boston College Law School Faculty Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Relevance of Colonial Appeals to the Privy Council Mary Sarah Bilder1 The famous case of Perrin v. Blake may have begun with a hurricane. On 28 August 1722, a terrible hurricane hit Jamaica, almost precisely ten years after an earlier one. Port Royal was destroyed and hundreds of people died, including several hundred enslaved Africans when a slave ship sank in the harbor. Within a year or two, perhaps amidst the disease that followed, William Williams died. He thought his wife might be pregnant. He left a will attempting to provide for that possibility. The words chosen—and a series of later unfortunate events—gave rise to an appeal from Jamaica to the Privy Council. This appeal proved so troubling to English lawyers and judges that it was transferred into the regular English legal system.