Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/318

judge and executive of the settlement. It is interesting to note that there was not a copy of the code of the State of New York at the time in the country, nor for a number of years afterward, but a copy of the Iowa code was brought in about two years later. The court, it is said, entered at once upon its duties and disposed of the estate to the enlire satisfaction of the community. The next step in formative development was the creation of a supreme court, a probate court, and justices' courts, the former to consist of a supreme judge and two justices of the peace, with a jurisdiction both appellate and original. Its original jurisdiction extended to cases of treason, felony, and breaches of the peace, and to civil cases where the sum claimed exceeded $50. To safeguard justice it was provided that no justice of the peace should assist in trying any case that was brought before the supreme court by appeal from his judgment. The idea was not lost sight of as it was later incorporated into the constitution of the State when the supreme court was composed of judges at nisi prius, inhibiting any one of them sitting as a trier of the cause in the first instance from taking part in the decision in the appellate jurisdiction. But, notwithstanding this injunction of obvious propriety, the criticism was sometimes indulged that the manner of organization gave rise to a bond of sympathy and fellow-feeling between the judges, the tendency of which was to affirm the action of the trial court, or, perhaps, rather to make a reversal more difficult than if the supreme court was entirely a distinct tribunal in its personnel as well as in its jurisdiction from that entertaining original cognizance. In the further development of government, by the organic law, the judicial power was vested in a supreme court and such inferior courts of law, equity, and arbitration as might from time to time be established by law. The supreme court consisted of one judge to be elected by the house of