Role of the chief justice of Munster
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 lord president's council and travelled with him on assize. In 1600 Queen Elizabeth I issued an order that both 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, going on circuit could be a hazardous experience: there was a serious riot during the assizes at Tralee in 1579 in which several Court officials were killed. In 1601–02, during the political crisis caused by the Battle of Kinsale, the lord president's court temporarily assumed the powers of the courts of common law. In 1620, Luke Gernon, the second justice 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 wide powers given to the president's court led to clashes with the long-established courts, especially the Court of Chancery (Ireland). In 1622 an official instruction was issued to the Court of Munster, and its fellow court in Connacht, not to "intermeddle" with cases which were clearly within the jurisdiction of another court.
By 1620, according to Luke Gernon, the 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 modelled on the Council of Wales and the Marches, with "a President, two justices and a council. We sit in council at a table".
The office of Chief Justice of Munster was an onerous one, and it was generally considered inadvisable to combine it with any other senior judicial position. William Saxey aroused much indignation in 1599 when he refused to resign as Chief Justice on being appointed a justice of the Court of King's Bench (Ireland), which was considered the more improper since he never sat in the latter Court, and increasingly neglected his duties in Munster as well. On the other hand, it was understood that the office holder could expect to be promoted in due course to one of the courts of common law or even become its chief justice, as James Dowdall, Sir Nicholas Walsh and Lord Sarsfield did.
An exception to the general rule against holding two judicial offices at once seems to have been made for Gerald Comerford, who was appointed both Chief Justice of Munster and a Baron of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) shortly before his death in 1604. This was probably in consideration of his 20 years of loyal service to the Crown: his lack of a proper reward for his long and loyal service was a subject about which he had complained frequently over the years. He was also Attorney General for Connacht, an office he held for life.
There was apparently no objection to the chief justice holding a purely local judicial office at the same time, or sitting in Parliament: Henry Gosnold, through much of his long career, was also the admiralty judge for Munster. This was at the time the only local division of the Irish Admiralty Court: the judge in Munster was a deputy to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who was generally ex officio the Irish admiralty judge. Sir Richard Aylward sat in the Parliament of 1585–6 while also serving as second justice of Munster, and John Meade, who sat in two Elizabethan parliaments, had also been Second Justice and Recorder of Cork.