Fredenc Samson Ey With head and respectful A COMPENDIUM OF THE LAW OF PRESCRIPTION IN CEYLON. BY Sinadhiraj, Ilang: Sinivara!, Bachelor of Laws of the University of France, Barrister-at-Law, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Ceylon. COLOMBO. 1901. The PREFACE. The following pages are a summary of the lectures delivered by me on the Law of Prescription, to the law students of Ceylon, when I was one of the lecturers appointed by the Council of Legal Education. At the request of some of my old students who find those lectures useful to them even after they have joined the profession, I have been induced to publish them in a compendious form. In Ceylon legal literature has not been so encouraged as to make it worth while for lawyers here, as in other countries, to devote time and attention to the compilation of special treatises on different branches of the law that obtains here. The want of such works, however, is often felt not only by law students, but even by professional lawyers to whom time is an object. To the minor judiciary of the Island, which consists almost entirely of Civil Servants who have had no professional training, the importance of such works cannot be over estimated, considering the time, trouble, and research that are necessary to ascertain the law of Ceylon in its present state of complexity. The study of law, which is proverbially a dry, abstruse science, has been rendered more difficult in Ceylon than elsewhere, by the complicated form to which it has been reduced. Two different systems of law-the Roman Dutch Law and English Law-have been mixed together to meet the exigencies of the times, and apparently without a comprehensive plan, and the compound has been modified from time to time by the local Legislature for the last one hundred years. The combination of the two systems has sometimes produced the most unlooked for results at the hands of the Judges of the Supreme Court, the authorised expounders of law in this Island. The lawgiver had, therefore, to intervene every now and then in order to patch up the breaches in his mould, and the work of mending seems to be still going on hand in hand with fresh developments in the art of expounding. In addition to the above conglomerate body of laws, there are also laws of purely local growth, such as the Thessawalemme, the Kandyan law, and the Mukkuva laws which prevail in particular localities. To extricale the law in the form in which it actually exists, from the tangled mass of legislation and judicial decisions is therefore, by no means an easy task. I have endeavoured in these pages to present to the student in a connected and systematic form, the law of Prescription-an important branch of law-which in Ceylon has passed through various phases. The introduction deals with the history of the law from the earliest times to the present day, including the changes it has undergone from time to time by ligislation as well as by judicial interpretation. Without a correct knowledge of the history of the law and of the changes made in it from time to time by legislation, judicial interpretation would, it need hardly be added, be a mere unscientific guess-work, and it would be difficult, in many a case, for the student cr the practitioner to appreciate the difference hetween good and bad law, if the interpretation should depend entirely on verbal quibbling. In the body body of the work are brought together the principles of the law as at present prevailing in Ceylon, collected and collated from the Roman Dutch Law, the Local Ordinances, and the judgments of the Supreme Court, together with the leading cases bearing on the subject. I trust that the student will find this little volume a useful introduction to the Law of Prescription in Ceylon, and I am not without hope that it may prove to be of some use even to the practitioner. I have to congratulate myself on having had a special stroke of good luck while revising the proofs. I have been fortunate enough to be able to submit these pages to the judgment of one who, by his profound learning and sound critical acumen, is admitted on all hands to be the best qualified to express an opinion on the subject matter of this brochure- I mean the Honourable Sir John Winfield-Bonser, our present Chief Justice. And I take this opportunity of tendering to his Lordship my grateful thanks for having spared, amidst the pressure of his onerous duties, a portion of his valuable time to read over these pages, and for having given me some most useful suggestions. I have also to acknowledge thankfully my indebtedness to my learned friends Mr. Walter Pereira Barrister-at-Law and Mr. E. W. Perera, Advocate, for helping me to revise the proofs. |
