Eighteenth-eentury efforts to regularize the adjudication of prize led the British Admiralty Court to develop standardized questions for members of captured crews. Known as the Standing Interrogatories, these questions elicited detailed information on the act of capture, the vessel and cargo seized, the behaviour of the prize maker, any extenuating circumstances (such as a licence), and whatever other shipping intelligence the subject could contribute.

By the War of 1812, colonial prize courts had adopted a fairly elaborate list of thirty-four questions that were put to one or more representative crew members from every prize. In the documents of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Halifax, 443 cases, or 62 percent of files contain at least one and as many as seven responses to the Standing Interrogatories. Sworn under oath, the information gathered from these documents provides a profile of American and foreign shipping along the eastern coast of North America during the War of 1812 and a testament to the activities of prizemakers, whether navy or provincial privateers.

Dr. Christopher Robinson recorded the following list of questions in 1812 and it was published subsequently in the legal series, English Reports, Vol. 165. They are described as: