Court-Fees Act, 1870

The Court-Fees Act, 1870 governs the fees that must be paid when filing documents -- like plaints, appeals, and applications -- in courts and certain public offices across Pakistan (Section 1). Its central rule, in Sections 4 and 6, is simple: certain listed documents cannot be filed, exhibited, or recorded by a court or public office unless the proper fee (as set out in the Act's schedules) has been paid.

Chapter II deals specifically with fees in the High Courts, including on their extraordinary, appellate, and revisional jurisdiction (Sections 3-5), while Chapter III covers fees in other ("Mufassal") courts and public offices generally. Section 7 is one of the most practically important provisions: it explains how the court fee is calculated for different kinds of suits -- for example, in money suits the fee is based on the amount claimed, in maintenance suits it's based on ten times the annual amount claimed, and in suits over immovable property the fee depends on the property's value, computed in a fairly technical way that varies by whether the land pays government revenue.

Chapter III-A (Sections 19A-19K) deals specifically with the fees payable on probates and letters of administration (the documents needed to administer a deceased person's estate), including relief if too much or too little fee was paid, and requirements to notify revenue authorities of such applications.

The remaining chapters are largely procedural: Chapter IV sets rules for the fees paid to process-servers ("process-fees"), and Chapter V governs how fees are actually collected, mainly through court-fee stamps, including rules on cancelling stamps and handling documents where a stamp was inadvertently accepted without full payment.

This is a very old procedural statute (1870) still central to how Pakistani courts operate, but it has been amended, and partially repealed, many times -- the extract shows sections removed by a Repealing Act of 1870 itself, an 1891 Amending Act, and various later adaptation orders. Given its age, any specific fee calculation should be checked against the current Schedules and any provincial court-fee amendments, since these are frequently revised.