"The executive authority of Southern Rhodesia is vested in Her Majesty and may be exercised on Her Majesty's behalf by the Governor ... Section 43 provides for the Governor appointing a Prime Minister acting in accordance with his own discretion and appointing other Ministers on the advice of the Prime Minister, and it states "
"The Government have made an unconstitutional declaration of independence.
"6. So far as a municipal court is concerned a de facto government is a de jure government in the sense that it is the only law- making and law-enforcing government functioning ` for the time being ' within the state.
" 2. I find as a fact that the present Government has effective control of the territory and this control seems likely to continue.
" every person who under this Act is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies or who under any enactment for the time being in force in any country mentioned in subsection (3) of this section is a citizen of that country shall by virtue of that citizenship have the status of a British subject."
"It is an historical fact that the government of Texas, then in full control of the State, was its only actual government; and certainly if Texas had been a separate State, and not one of the United States, the new government, having displaced the regular authority, and having established itself in the customary seats of power, and in the exercise of the ordinary functions of administration, would have constituted, in the strictest sense of the words, a de facto government, and its acts, during the period of its existence as such, would be effectual, and, in almost all respects, valid. And, to some extent, this is true of the actual government of Texas, though unlawful and revolutionary, as to the United States.
"The difference between the two cases is the difference between submitting to a force which could not be controlled and voluntarily aiding to create that force."
"We admit that the acts of the several States in their individual capacities, and of their different departments of government, executive, judicial, and legislative, during the war, so far as they did not impair or tend to impair the supremacy of the National authority, or the just rights of citizens under the Constitution, are, in general, to be treated as valid and binding; The existence of a state of insurrection and war did not loosen the bonds of society, or do away with civil government, or the regular administration of the laws. Order was to to be preserved, police regulations maintained, crime prosecuted, property protected, contracts enforced, marriages celebrated, estates settled, and the transfer and descent of property regulated precisely as in time of peace. No one that we are aware of seriously questions the validity of judicial or legislative acts in the insurrectionary States touching these and kindred subjects, where they were not hostile in their purpose or mode of enforcement to the authority of the National government, and did not impair the rights of citizens under the Constitution."
"XV. We have treated of him, who has now, or has had a Right to govern; it now remains, that we say something of him that usurps the Government; not after he has either by long Possession, or Agreement obtained a Right to it, but so long as the Cause of his unjust Possession continues. The Acts of Sovereignty exercised by such an Usurper may have an obligatory Force, not by virtue of his Right, (for he has none) but because it is very probable that the lawful Sovereign, whether it be the People themselves, or a King, or a Senate, chooses rather that the Usurper should be obeyed during that Time, than that the Exercise of the Laws and Justice should be interrupted and the State thereby exposed to all the disorders of anarchy."
"1. We have spoken of him who possesses or has possessed the right of governing. It remains to speak of the usurper of power, not after he has acquired a right through long possession or contract but while the basis of possession remains unlawful. Now while such a usurper is in possession, the acts of government which he performs may have a binding force, arising not from a right possessed by him, for no such right exists, but from the fact that one to whom the sovereignty actually belongs, whether people, King, or senate, would prefer that measures promulgated by him should meanwhile have the force of law, in order to avoid the utter confusion which would result from the subversion of laws and suppression of the Courts."
"In 1924 and in subsequent years the courts of the United States extended the doctrine of ` justice and public policy ' to cover acts of unrecognized foreign governments. They interpreted the civil war cases as suggesting, in the words of Mr. Justice Cardozo in Sokoloff v. National City Bank (239 N.Y. 158; (1924) 145 N.E. 917 at p. 918), ` the possibility that a body or group which has vindicated by the course of events its pretensions to sovereign power, but which has forfeited by its conduct the privileges or immunities of sovereignty, may gain for its acts and decrees a validity quasi-governmental, if violence to fundamental principles of justice or to our own public policy might otherwise be done '. In the same judgment Mr. Justice Cardozo, while affirming the principle that ` juridically, a government that is unrecognized may be viewed as no government at all, if the power withholding recognition chooses thus to view it ', qualified the genera] rule by the statement that ` in practice, however, since juridical conceptions are seldom, if ever, carried to the limit of their logic, the equivalence is not absolute, but is subject to self-imposed limitations of common sense and fairness, as we learned in litigations following our Civil War'."
"I call on the citizens of Rhodesia to refrain from all acts which would further the objectives of the illegal authorities.
"The necessity relied on in the present case" said Fieldsend J. (at p. 185) "is the need to avoid the vacuum which would result from a refusal to give validity to the acts and legislation of the present authorities in continuing to provide for the every day requirements of the inhabitants of Rhodesia over a period of two years. If such acts were to be without validity there would be no effective means of providing money for the hospitals, the police, or the courts, of making essential by-laws for new townships or of safe-guarding the people in any emergency which might occur, to mention but a few of the numerous matters which require attention in the complex modem state. Without constant attention to such matters the whole machinery of the administration would break down, to be replaced by 'chaos, : and the welfare of the inhabitants of all races would be grievously affected."