that the Judges, who, with a legal and constitutional discretion,
declined giving any opinion in this matter, acted as became them; and
your Committee sees no reason why the Peers at this day should be less
attentive to the rights of their court with regard to an exclusive
judgment on their own proceedings or to the rights of the Commons acting
as accusers for the whole commons of Great Britain in that court, or why
the Judges should be less reserved in deciding upon any of these points
of high Parliamentary privilege, than the Judges of that and the
preceding periods. This present case is a proceeding in full Parliament,
and not like the case under the commission in the time of James II., and
still more evidently out of the province of Judges in the inferior
courts.

All the precedents previous to the trial of Warren Hastings, Esquire,
seem to your Committee to be uniform. The Judges had constantly refused
to give an opinion on any of the powers, privileges, or competencies of
either House. But in the present instance your Committee has found, with
great concern, a further matter of innovation. Hitherto the constant
practice has been to put questions to the Judges but in the three
following ways: as, 1st, A question of pure abstract law, without
reference to any case, or merely upon an A.B. case stated to them; 2dly,
To the legal construction of some act of Parliament; 3dly, To report the
course of proceeding in the courts below upon an abstract case. Besides
these three, your Committee knows not of a single example of any sort,
during the course of any judicial proceeding at the bar of the House of
Lords, whether the prosecution has been by indictment, by information
from the Attorney-General, or by impeachment of the House of Commons.

In the present trial, the Judges appear to your Committee not to have
given their judgment on points of law, stated as such, but to have in