IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

despite the scant attention paid to it in the historiography. Without a solid understanding of the
nature and functioning of consular courts and the ways in which they interacted with the other
legal orders present in Morocco, we cannot understand how protection affected the daily lives of
the Moroccans—both protégés and non-protégés—whom it touched.
The Evolution and Functioning of Consular Courts
The first point to be made about the nature of consular courts and the extent of their
jurisdiction is that the system was highly complex and its rules often observed in the breach.
Despite efforts on the part of consular and Makzhan officials to regulate the place of consular
courts in the Moroccan legal system, the divisions among jurisdictions were blurry at best and
everyone—protégés, foreigners, Moroccan subjects, and both Makhzan and consular officials—
at times crossed the lines supposedly separating different jurisdictions. Nonetheless, it is useful
to trace the evolution of the treaties governing the scope of consular courts’ jurisdiction to get a
sense of the rules which, in theory at least, regulated the functioning of the various legal
institutions.
Consular courts could be convened in any foreign consulate and were presided over by
the consul himself (sometimes along with others acting as jurors or assessors). 29 Consular courts
applied the law of the country they represented; a French consular court applied French law, a
Spanish court applied Spanish law, etc. 30 A consular court had exclusive jurisdiction over all
29
British and French consular courts technically required the presence of two assessors and, after 1889, juries made
up of five individuals: Clercq and Vallat, Guide pratique des consulats, v.1, 528-30; Lourde, “Les juridictions
consulaires,” 25-7. However, consuls sometimes had trouble finding appropriate people to serve in these roles,
especially earlier in the century when fewer foreigners lived in Morocco: see, e.g., MAE Nantes, Tanger A 138,
Méchain to MAE in Paris, 19 November 1837.
30
The definitive handbook for French consulates was published in 1880 and included a discussion of the French
laws concerning the judicial functions of consular courts: Clercq and Vallat, Guide pratique des consulats. On this,
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