Colonial objections to admiralty courts were about substance, not procedure, as the Revolution proved.

Evidence

Spry’s court was abolished in 1768. The British next tried a network of four regional courts, sitting in Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. These regional courts were supposed to share jurisdiction with the older vice-​ admiralty courts. But in practice the regional courts merely replaced courts in the towns where they sat. Then came the Revolution. Curiously, the courts of admiralty did not vanish. The colonials had had two bones to pick with the vice-​ admiralty courts: first, their procedures were offensive, and second, they enforced offensive law. But when war broke out, the second objective disappeared. The new state governments found it useful to create their own vice-​admiralty courts—​for cases of prize law, for example. Massachusetts, among other states, did this in 1775; though, true to the common law mentality, a jury of “twelve good and lawful men” would be the fact-​finders in these courts. Interestingly, Massachusetts later gave up the jury in admiralty cases, supposedly because sea law was too intricate for the “good and lawful men.” The “wisdom of all civilized nations” gave the power over facts and law to admiralty judges. Procedure, in other words, was not the issue: the issue was control over economic and political substance. In 1787 the Constitution put admiralty law into the hands of the central, federal courts; and there it stays. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 248

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallel to the sacrifice article’s insight that objections often target who controls the instrument, not the instrument itself — procedural complaints evaporate when masters change.