Prerogative, Prerogative Court

PREROGATIVE - The privilege, preeminence, or advantage which one person has over another; thus a person vested with an office, is entitled to all the rights, privileges, prerogatives, etc. which belong to it.

English law. The royal prerogative is an arbitrary power vested in the executive to do good and not evil.

PREROGATIVE COURT - eccles. law. The name of a court in England in which all testaments are proved and administrations granted, when the deceased has left bona notabilia in the province in some other diocese than that in which he died.

The testamentary courts of the two archbishops, in their respective provinces, are styled prerogative courts, from the prerogative of each archbishop to grant probates and administrations, where there are bona, notabilia; but still these are only inferior and subordinate jurisdictions; and the style of these courts has no connection with the royal prerogative. Derivatively, these courts are the king's ecclesiastical courts; but immediately they are only the courts of the ecclesiastical ordinary. The ordinary, and not the crown, appoints the judges of these courts; they are subject to the control of the king's courts of chancery and common law in case they exceed their jurisdiction; and they are subject in some instances to the command of these courts if they decline to exercise their jurisdiction when by law they ought to exercise it.
   

This entry contains material from Bouvier's Legal Dictionary, a work published in the 1850's.