Chief Justice of Munster

The Chief Justice of Munster was the senior of the two judges who assisted the Lord President of Munster in judicial matters. Despite the judge's title of Chief Justice, full judicial authority was actually vested in the Lord President, who "had power to hear and determine at his discretion all manner of complaints in any part of the province of Munster", and also had powers of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery.

The hearing of judicial business in the province of Munster was delegated by the Lord President to the Chief Justice and the second justice, who were members of the President's council and always travelled with him on circuit. In 1600 the Queen issued an order that the justices must always be in attendance on the Lord President, unless he gave them special leave of absence. In the court's earlier years, it seems that there was no central judicial seat: the court could be convened wherever the President thought it necessary. Due to the chronic disturbances in Elizabethan Munster the circuit could be a hazardous one: there was a serious riot in Tralee in 1579 in which several officials were reported to have been killed. In 1601-2, during the crisis caused by the Battle of Kinsale, the Lord President's Court temporarily assumed the powers of the courts of common law. In 1620 one of the judges of the Court recorded that "when the President goeth forth, he is attended in military form, when he rideth, by a troop of horse (cavalry), when he walketh by a company of foot (infantry) with pikes and muskets".

The width of the powers given to the President's court led to clashes with the long-established courts, especially the Court of Chancery (Ireland). In 1622 a sharp instruction was issued to the Court of Munster, and its fellow court in Connacht, not to "intermeddle" with cases which were properly the business of another court.

By 1620, according to Luke Gernon, second justice of Munster, the Court had established a permanent seat in Limerick, where it held its sessions in King John's Castle. In his interesting manuscript, A Discourse of Ireland 1620, Gernon states that the Court was modeled on the Council of Wales and the Marches, with "a President, two justices and a council. We sit in council at a table".

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