On May 1, 1671, the Lords Proprietors vested the Governor in Council with complete judicial power and authority. The Council heard its first civil case on September 9, 1671, and functioned as both a civil and criminal court until the Proprietors turned the responsibility for all civil cases over to the newly-established Berkeley County Court on May 10, 1682.

The Governor in Council continued to hear criminal cases and aside from cases involving debts under forty shillings, which an Act of September 25, 1683 allowed Justices of the Peace to hear without appeal, sat as well as a supreme court and heard appeals from the Berkeley County court. The Berkeley County Court operated from 1682 until 1698 when the Proprietors abolished it, giving the Chief Justice authority over both criminal and civil cases, and establishing the Court of Common Pleas - or the General Court - as the court of record for all civil cases.

This court served the entire colony, but met only in Charles Town; the Governor in Council in Charles Town continued to hear all appeals. An Act of 1712 gave the Court of Common Pleas the same powers as its English counterpart, and court procedures generally followed the English judicial practice.

In 1721, the General Assembly made a short-lived effort to make the judicial system more accessible to areas far from Charleston, in short to decentralize South Carolina courts. The effort failed, however, and decentralization had to wait until 1769 when the General Assembly passed a circuit court Act and created the seven judicial districts of Beaufort, Camden, Charleston, Cheraws, Georgetown, Ninety-Six, and Orangeburg. The law became a reality three years later after the necessary courthouses and jails had been built and the courts actually began to function. The records themselves were kept in Charleston until 1790.

During the 1700s the court heard many cases involving debt or trespass, recorded renunciations of dower (a wife's common law right to a portion of her husband's land), had the power to partition jointly-owned land (usually estates), and, because it followed English judicial practice, heard a number of cases that would be considered criminal today - information about violations of the navigation act, crimes against slave property, and crimes against personal property.

The case papers for the Court of Common Pleas are called judgement rolls, and information about cases can be found in the nearly 15,000 that survive - the bulk of them for the years after 1753. Information can also be found in judgement books where the clerk entered the texts of unsettled cases.

Aside from the way some appointments were made, the early South Carolina State Constitution of 1776 authorized the General Assembly to elect judges and sheriffs. The Revolution altered neither the districts created in 1769 nor the three circuits in the system that served them - the Charleston circuit, the northen circuit of Georgetown, Cheraws, and Camden, and the southern circuit of Beaufort, Orangeburg, and Ninety-Six.

After the Revolutionary War, however, things did change. In 1783, the General Assembly divided each district into counties. In 1785, it established county courts as subsidiaries of the circuit courts. In 1790, the Constitution allowed judges to serve during good behavior, and elected sheriffs to four-year terms. In 1791, the General Assembly redrew the districts of Ninety-Six and Camden to create two new judicial districts - Pinckney and Washington. During the short life span of the county courts - from 1785 to 1789 - their numbers varied.

1800 brought major changes to the State's judicial system. Laws passed in 1798 and 1799 abolished the old district and county courts, divided the State into twenty-five (25) judicial districts, established four law circuits, created a new State officer - the circuit solicitor - and, organized a separate system of equity courts. The twenty-five (25) judicial districts were Abbeville, Barnwell, Beaufort, Charleston, Chester, Chesterfield, Colleton, Darlington, Edgefield, Fairfield, Georgetown, Greenville, Kershaw, Lancaster, Laurens, Marion, Marlboro, Newberry, Orangeburg, Pendleton, Richland, Spartanburg, Sumter, Union, and York.

Legislation in 1826 divided the Pendleton District into Anderson and Pickens - they became judicial districts in 1827 but did not function as such until 1828. Clarendon District was created in 1855 and began functioning as a judicial district in 1857.

The principal records of the Court of Common Pleas during the antebellum period are the judgement rolls, the direct and indirect indexes to judgements,decrees in summary process, abstracts of judgements, pleadings and judgements, confessions of judgements, the rules book, the calendards, and the court journals, which were standardized in 1839. Other records include naturalization notices and petitions, petitions of insolvent debtors, and petitions for guardianship of free slaves.