Compagnie française des Indes occidentales
The French West India Company envisioned a system of judicial unity within a framework of institutional diversity that was to be facilitated by the judges in all the colonies. The Company wanted judges in the colonies to observe the Custom of Paris. Given the nature of the 17th and 18th-century modes of governance and arbitration, there was considerable regional variation within the practice of the law, even within a colony. From 1665, the colony's governor-general controlled foreign relations and the military, while the intendant and the Sovereign Councils of Quebec and Louisbourg operated as judicial bodies, among other things.