Law Practitioners in the Mayor's Court1726

When Bombay set up an admiralty court in 1684, it did not go looking for a trained lawyer to be its judge advocate — it appointed an expert in civil law, and otherwise the Company was largely uninterested in bringing lawyers over from England at all. That same attitude carried straight through to the Mayor's Courts the Charter of 1726 created, and this topic explains exactly why the bench and bar of that court stayed so unprofessional.

In two minutes

The Company showed little interest in staffing its early courts, including the Mayor's Courts created by the Charter of 1726, with professionally trained lawyers, appointing merchants and Company servants without legal background instead — leaving the legal profession under this Charter just as unorganised as it had been before British rule.

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