Sotheby's calls the laws "hopelessly ambiguous French colonial decrees" that have no force today.
"The original complaint relied on a series of hopelessly ambiguous French colonial decrees," Sotheby's said in a statement.
In a statement the auction house said the trip by the lawyers "will not change critical weaknesses in the government's case — most importantly, its reliance on hopelessly ambiguous French colonial decrees".
Arguments and lawsuits have ensued, often focusing — without merit, the recent state opinion held — on a Colonial-era decree called the Andros Patent, which provided the governmental underpinnings for what evolved into the Board of Trustees.
If colonial Maryland decreed that any white woman who married a slave would become a slave herself, that law failed to deter the 1681 wedding of Eleanor Butler, an indentured servant who told Lord Baltimore that she would rather marry "Negro Charles" than Lord Baltimore himself.
The council's power included the naming of judges and minor officials, control of public funds and commerce with France, regulation of the fur trade with the Indians, and the right to issue policy decrees on colonial affairs.
One such example is Virunga: the "brutal" expulsion of "Pygmy" peoples from their ancestral territories in order to make way for national parks started during the colonial period with the 1925 royal decree establishing the Virunga National Park, according to the Centre d'Accompagnement des Autochtones Pygmées et Minoritaires Vulnérables and the Forest Peoples Programme, who I used to work for.
Prohibition of colonial purchases of French molasses, though decreed, went largely unenforced, and New England, home of most of the carrying trade, continued prosperous.
Jews had not been allowed to officially reside in colonial French Louisiana due to the Code Noir, a decree passed by France's King Louis XIV in 1685 that forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism, and ordered all Jews out of France's colonies.
The new text, approved by the voters on 13 October 1946, reduced the African representatives from 30 to 24, and reduced the number of those entitled to vote; also, a large number of colonial topics were left in which the executive could govern by decree, and supervision over the colonial administration remained weak.
