Legal Form Book of Peter Tinsley, Clerk of the High Court of Chancery

Tinsley Form Book Summary

Peter Tinsley served as George Wythe’s clerk while Wythe presided over the High Court of Chancery. As clerk, Tinsley compiled a collection of forms for the various documents that the court would need to issue. This collection is referred to as Tinsley’s “form book.” This book was intended to save time and labor by providing a repository of model language so that the clerk would not have to start from scratch every time the court needed to issue a document. This book may also have served a related (whether intentional or incidental) purpose of standardizing the language of documents issued by the court so that court documents were consistent.

The form book is divided into eight sections, plus an index.

1. Forms of Injunctions (pages 1-10): An injunction is an order by the court for a party to do or not to do something. These form injunctions generally address situations in which the court needed to stop a party “from further proceeding on a judgment.”
   For example, one form in this section is the plain “Injunction to a Judgment on a forthcoming bond.” Many of the forms appear to be derivative of this one, with subtle differences. They differ in length, the location of the court, the parties involved, the amount of bond required, and probably other respects more readily apparent to the careful eye of Tinsley. There are forms for situations involving “part of a judgment” or “8 years interest [on a judgment]” or “[a] Judg[ment] [that] was affirmed on an appeal” or “a Judg[ment] [o]btained by assignee,” or “Judgments obtained in different ~ Courts.” It is clear that Tinsley wanted to have several examples to choose from. He must have appreciated the subtle differences in the cases that came before the court.
   Other highlights from this section include a form to direct a trustee to refrain from selling certain property and another to direct an official (“the Sergeant of the City of Richmond”) not to seize or liquidate certain property. No matter the details of the next injunction that the court needed to issue, Tinsley probably had a form that was at least close to it.
2. Forms of Orders (pages 11-50): Court orders often involve decisions on motions. One such motion is a “demurrer,” which is a motion asking the court to dismiss the case because it is fatally flawed in that the facts alleged provide no legal basis for relief. Tinsey had three forms dealing with demurrers. All three of them were for overruling demurrers, which would be used when the court decided that there was a legal basis for relief. Also, all three forms direct the defendant (the party who brought the motion and lost) to pay for the plaintiff’s costs related to the demurrer.
   Perhaps more interesting are the multiple orders dealing with parties who were out of the country, referred to as “absentees.” In at least three of these forms, it appears that the plaintiff is awarded land belonging to a defendant who had left the young nation, perhaps because the defendant had been a British loyalists. The revolutionary war fighting lingered in the south. As the fighting came to an end and the British were leaving the former colonies, “up to tens of thousands of loyalists sometimes went with the retreating army to Britain and other parts of the British Empire.” So, these forms may indicate that the George Wythe heard cases (perhaps even regularly) where British Loyalists lost their land by default.
   Some forms in the second section contain probably unfamiliar terms like “fieri facias.” According to the Cornell LII, “This is a court document that instructs a sheriff to seize and sell a defendant's property in order to satisfy a monetary judgment against the defendant.” Then there is the “Scire Facias,” which is “a writ, founded on a record, requiring the person against whom it is issued to appear and show cause why the record should not be enforced or annulled.”
3. Certificates (pages 51-52): This section contains three forms. The first two are for dismissing a case and the last one is for verifying that the plaintiff obtained a bond.
4. Process (pages 53-70): The first few forms in this section are called “supersedeas[es].” These forms are directed to the sheriff and appear to have something to do with holding off on collections while an appeal is pending. According to Jones day, a “supersedeas bond” is “the bond a losing defendant must pay to secure its right to appeal and stay the judgment.”
   Other forms in this section are used to bring someone before the court (“attachment”). There are several forms labelled with the term “Scire facias.” These forms are also directed to the sheriff and most of them involve the situation where a party has “departed this life,” apparently while the case was pending. The forms “command” the sheriff to “summon” someone to come before the court. There are also forms of “Certiorari,” in a few different variations, each of which is directed to the justices of a particular county, apparetly used to request records from those justices of the proceedings in cases that had been appealed to the High Court of Chancery. The labels of other forms in this section contain terms such as “Writ,” “Mandamus,” “Commission,” “Habeus Corpus,” and “Subpoena.”
5. Executions (pages 71-76): Each of the executions is directed to the sheriff, requesting that the sheriff procure money from the sheriff’s “bailiwick” to be paid on a court award. This section also contains a form titled a “Writ of Elegit,” which directs the sheriff to take one person’s property and give it to another person “saving only the oxen and beasts of his plough, and also a moiety of all [the judgment debtor’s] lands and tenements.”
6. Rules of Court (pages 77-80): This section lists procedural rules in the High Court of Chancery that deal with issues such as timing for motions, examination of witnesses, examination of accounts, dismissal of cases, and reinstatement of cases. One rule seems to be directed at clearing the court’s docket; it states that all cases “depending at the rules” would be dismissed unless the plaintiffs took action to move them along “on the first rule day after the next term.”
7. Bonds (pages 81-88): These forms generally seem to have been used to verify that someone (probably the appealing party in most cases) has posted security (a bond) in case one of the other parties suffers damages. The bond would protect the appellee and provide him with a source of recovery for his costs litigating the appeal “in case the said decree be affirmed.”
8. Appeal (pages 89-90): There is only one form in this section. It is taken from a proceeding that took place before Judge George Wythe on September 1, 1799. It appears to be a recitation of several procedural events that took place. Perhaps Tinsley used this form as a model for other instances when Wythe ordered, “Be it remembered...” as he did here.

See also

• Peter Tinsley
• Wythe's Judicial Career
• Commission to Take Depositions, 9 November 1796

External links

• Read this book in Google Books.