(b) In Ceylon; In Ceylon the continuance of the Roman-Dutch Law was guaranteed by the Proclamation of Governor the Honourable Francis North of September 23, 1799, which declared that the administration of justice and police should ‘henceforth and during His Majesty's pleasure be exercised in all Courts of Judicature, Civil and Criminal, according to the laws and institutions that subsisted under the ancient government of the United Provinces subject to such deviations and alterations as have been or shall be by lawful authority ordained and published’.[1] The central portion of the island did not pass under British rule until 1815, but the Dutch Law was applied to this region also by Ord. No. 5 of 1852.[2] (c) In British Guiana. In Guiana the existing laws and usages were expressly retained in the articles of capitulation of Essequibo and Demerara dated September 18, 1803. A similar provision is contained in the Letters Patent of March 4, 1831, by which the three settlements were constituted a single colony under the name of British Guiana[3].
General result.
It results from what has been said that the foundation of the law of Cape Colony is the Dutch Law as it existed in that settlement in the year 1806; that the law of Ceylon is based upon the Roman-Dutch system administered in the island in 1796;[4] and that the law of British Guiana rests upon a substructure of Dutch laws and usages- ↑ It has been doubted whether the Dutch ever applied their law to the native races of the low country. But since the British occupation the low-country, Sinhalese have had no distinctive law of their own, and have always been treated as subject to the Roman-Dutch law.
- ↑ This Ordinance extends to the Kandyan provinces certain specified branches of the law of the Maritime Provinces, and further enacts that if the Kandyan Law is silent on any matter the law of the Maritime Provinces is to be applied. It says nothing as to the general law applicable to Europeans or low-country Sinhalese residing in the Kandyan provinces. The extension to them of the Roman-Dutch Law in general seems to be the work of judicial decisions (see Williams v. Robertson (1886) 8 S. C. C. 36).
- ↑ For the history of the Roman-Dutch Law in British Guiana see Report of the Common Law Commission (Georgetown, Demerara, 1914) and ‘Roman-Dutch Law in British Guiana’ (Journ. Comp. Leg., N.S., vol. xiv (1914), p. 11), by the present writer.
- ↑ The capitulation of Colombo to the British is dated February 15 of that year.
