There were other indications of a pragmatic ad hoc response fashioned to serve traditional aims. To avoid the inconvenience of going to Parliament on every issue, Reeves recommended the continued use of the royal prerogative via proclamations by the Governor. Although he noted that questions might be raised about this procedure in light of the statutory regime, he had in a recent case involving the killing of sea birds upheld the governor. And although in 1791 he had recommended a public fund and a legislature to complement a Judicature Act, he now felt the second could be dropped as the population was not ready for representative institutions.⁴²

The statutory initiatives of 1791 and 1792 were not written in stone. Until 1809, as noted above, they were on a form of probation. The Chief Justice was required to be a permanent resident only in 1798, and the Governor remained a seasonal visitor until 1818. In this light it cannot surprise that the nominees as Chief Justice in the early years of the new experiment were, in terms of their legal skills, lesser men than Reeves. None were legally trained. All owed their careers to patronage (contemporaneously the leading path to political preferment in the Mother Country) rather than to merit. D'Ewes Coke, Reeves' successor, was a surgeon who owed his position as collector of customs to the patronage of his employer, Benjamin Lester of Poole, the wealthiest merchant in the Newfoundland trade. He resigned rather than become a year-round resident. His successor, Richard Routh, characterized as "an inveterate place-seeker", followed the same route with the same support, and was no more keen to exercise his responsibilities as Chief Justice on anything but a seasonal basis. He drowned while on his way to England in 1801 in direct disregard of his instructions. Jonathan Ogden, surgeon and Chief Surrogate Judge, inherited the office until incapacitated by a stroke two years later. In turn, his Chief Surrogate, Thomas Tremlett, tar from alone in having gone bankrupt in his business affairs during the economic downturn on the late 1780's, succeeded at the age of 35. Of the three charges--incompetence, partiality and venality--with which the local merchants charged him in 1809, his biographers acquit him of only the last. However, the Privy Council Committee for Trade found no legal grounds upon which to remove him. A political solution, which turned out to be no solution at all, was reached in 1813: Tremlett would change places with Caesar Colclough, the equally unpopular Chief Justice of Prince Edward Island. The first Justice since Reeves to hold a degree in law, Colclough was never happy in St. John's, prey to financial worries, fears of sectarian violence which was on the rise, deteriorating health, and a heavy workload occasioned by population increase, the postwar economic recession, and the fact that almost all those who appeared before him were lay pleaders.⁴³ In at least partial mitigation of this less than sterling progression of early Justices, a lack of trained candidates for the Bench was unsurprising in light of the impermanent nature of the legal regime and political institutions generally in the generation after 1791. With the appointment of Francis Forbes in 1816 all would change, and the beginnings of a systematic body of jurisprudence suited to the realities of life on the Island and in Labrador would begin to emerge.