378 PARLIAMENTS OF THE DOMINIONS [PART III 
was registered in Scotland, had been registered in Newfound- 
land the Legislature could not affect acts done on the high 
seas bevond its territorial limits. He said :(— 
The Terra Nova is a ship of the British nation, and as such 
the Imperial Parliament would unquestionably be competent 
to give effect to an Act prohibiting with penalties the killing 
of seals or such like at a specified time anywhere over the 
seas by persons on board said ship, but that is from supreme 
and unlike Colonial limited authority. 
Little J.! on the whole agreed in this view, though perhaps 
slightly less decisively; and on the other hand, Pinsent J.2 
held that the case was one in which the Court had jurisdic- 
tion, though it would not have had jurisdiction over a foreign 
ship pursuing the business from a foreign port: he held, 
however, that the Legislature could affect things within its 
limits, even if the action dealt with took place outside the 
limits, and this view has so much truth in it, and Carter C. J. 
agreed with it in this regard, that it cannot be denied that 
laws can be so worded as to effect pretty much what would 
have been effected by a direct exercise of extra-territorial 
legislation. For example—and this is no doubt what was 
at the back of Mr. Pinsent’s remarks—if the Legislature 
enacted, as it did in 1887 (50 Vict. c. 26), that it should not 
be legal to bring into the ports of Newfoundland seals caught 
on the high seas in the close season the legislation could not 
have been held to be invalid.? So to avoid extra-territorial 
legislation over foreigners, an Imperial Act of 19094 was passed 
by which the landing in England of fish caught by foreign 
vessels trawling in the Moray Firth was forbidden, and thus in 
great measure the aim of the law could be effected. There isan 
excellent example of the same principle in the legislation of the 
Federal Council of Australasia in 1888 and 1889 regarding the 
pearl fisheries in Queensland and Western Australia. Under 
t 1897 Newfoundland Decisions, at p. 343. ? Ibid., at pp. 333, 334. 
* Carter C. J. held that this Act did not apply to the case as it was passed 
after the capture of the seals in question. Pinsent J. held it did not, but 
relied on it as showing that the Act of 1879 on which the case proceeded 
was intended to operate extra-territorially. 4 9 Edw. VII. c. 8.