1
 

STATE OF JURISPRUDENCE DURING THE DUTCH
PERIOD, I623-I674.
 

" ORTY YEAES ago, I wrote as an in-

ti eduction to the first volume of the

lepoits of the Court of Common Pleas

of the City of New Yoik, of which I
was then a member, a history of the Court, which wa,s the oldest in
the State, having been established by the Dutch in 1653. When this
introduction was written little wa,s known respecting our early judicial
tribunals. Our first historian, Chief Justice Smith, devoted but a few
pages to the Dutch period and had nothing to communicate respecting
it, bnt the founding of the colony by the Dutch, the encroachment
upon it by the settlers from New England on Long Island, and the
particulars of its surrender to the English in 1664. David Graham, in
1834, published a work on the Jui-isdiction of our courts, in which he
simply copied what he fonnd in Smith, and went so far as to assume
that there was nothing remaining to show what courts existed among
the Dutch, or which would shed any light upon the manner in which