Definition
A commission of review was an extraordinary procedural mechanism in English ecclesiastical law by which a superior royal commission could be convened to revise or reexamine a sentence handed down by the Court of Delegates. The Court of Delegates was the highest appellate tribunal for ecclesiastical causes in England, hearing appeals from the ecclesiastical courts on behalf of the Crown. When a party believed that court had erred in a particularly serious or exceptional case, a commission of review offered a last resort for reconsideration of its judgment.
The commission was not a regular avenue of appeal but was granted only in extraordinary circumstances, effectively functioning as a check on the finality of the Court of Delegates' rulings. It operated under royal authority and was understood as an exceptional, discretionary remedy rather than a matter of right.
The mechanism became obsolete following statutory reforms in the 1830s and 1840s, when Parliament transferred ecclesiastical appellate jurisdiction from the Court of Delegates to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. With the Privy Council assuming the role of supreme appellate authority in ecclesiastical matters, the procedural rationale for a commission of review disappeared entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical artifact of English ecclesiastical court structure and will appear almost exclusively in pre-Victorian legal sources — commentaries, ecclesiastical law treatises, and materials predating the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Act 1833 and related reforms. Researchers encountering the term in post-reform texts will typically find it flagged as obsolete, as both Black's and Burrill's do explicitly.
The primary navigational trap is anachronism: a researcher reading older ecclesiastical law materials must understand that "commission of review" functioned within a court hierarchy that no longer exists. The Court of Delegates, the body whose sentences were subject to review, was itself a creature of Tudor-era statute (the Ecclesiastical Appeals Act 1532, under Henry VIII), and the entire appellate structure it anchored was dismantled by Whig-era parliamentary reform. Treating either body as a living institution would be a fundamental error.
For researchers tracing the development of English appellate jurisdiction — particularly in ecclesiastical causes touching marriage, probate, and church discipline — this term marks a boundary point. Sources that discuss it as current practice predate approximately 1833; sources that treat it as obsolete postdate those reforms. This makes it a useful dating signal when working with undated or ambiguously dated ecclesiastical law materials in the corpus.
American researchers will find no domestic equivalent. Colonial ecclesiastical law in America was fragmentary, and no analogous appellate commission structure was transplanted or developed in U.S. jurisdictions. The term has no practical relevance in American legal research except as historical context for understanding English ecclesiastical law sources that American courts occasionally cited in early probate and marriage disputes.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term — to the point of near-identical text — both citing Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 67) and Stephen's Commentaries (3 Steph. Comm. 432) as the core authorities. Burrill adds the specific statutory citations that accomplished the reform: 2 & 3 Will. IV c. 92; 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 41, s. 3; and 6 & 7 Vict. c. 38, providing a more precise legislative record of the transition to Privy Council jurisdiction.
Neither source provides substantive detail about the procedural mechanics of how a commission of review was constituted, who sat on it, or what standards governed its review — likely because the mechanism was already obsolete by the time both dictionaries were compiled and exhaustive treatment was deemed unnecessary. Researchers needing procedural depth should consult Blackstone and Stephen directly, and may find supplementary material in older ecclesiastical law treatises such as those of Richard Burn or Henry Consett.
The shared language across both dictionaries reflects the standard treatment this term received throughout the 19th-century common law dictionary tradition: acknowledged, briefly explained, and marked as a relic.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively an English ecclesiastical law concept with no American counterpart. Jurisdictions that inherited English common law did not replicate the Court of Delegates structure, and the commission of review has no recognized analog in any U.S., Canadian, or Commonwealth jurisdiction's legal system.