The British authorities foresaw the need for a judicial system to be established in the colony to deal with criminal matters.

The higher tier was to be the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction, which was to deal with the major offences occurring in the colony.

The lower tier was to be the existing English system of appointing justices of the peace to administer the lesser type of offences.

The scope of the colony was quite limited in its early days, so jurisdiction over places such as South Australia did not practically occur.

In the case of Van Diemen's Land, the court rarely sat there, and prisoners were brought to Sydney for trial, or dealt with summarily in Hobart.

Technically, the court had jurisdiction over offences committed in New Zealand but practically did not deal with any such matters.

Lawyers were not permitted (and in the early days of the court, there were none in the colony anyway), so technical objections were unlikely to arise.

Phillip wished the first sittings to be an example to the convicts and to impress upon them the authority of the court and the rule of law.

Collins later in his memoirs reflected that the first court was a failure, as the sentences imposed were not sufficiently strong to deter crimes in the colony.

The Governor's warrant was a necessary preliminary to an execution; but he was empowered by his commission to grant a pardon in any case which was not treason or murder.

While the Criminal Court was modelled on the basis of court-martial in England at the time, it was essentially different both in its constitution and its practice.

The role of judge advocate was therefore important, as the president of the court was usually a military officer not professionally qualified to deal with legal questions.

An ordinary court-martial court could get by with the procedures established for it because the offences tried before it were simply breaches of military discipline.

Putting this aside, Collins was satisfied that "when the state of the colony and the nature of its inhabitants are considered, it must be agreed that the administration of public justice could not have been placed with so much propriety in any other hands."