those to whom his orders were addressed in these documents. How then should his written constitution be enforced if these agencies did not obey him, if they failed, or worked amiss?
Here was really a different problem from that which had been presented under the old state of things. And yet it happened that no new provisions were made to meet it. The old methods and the old conceptions were followed. In Connecticut, in 1776, by a mere legislative Act, the charter of 1662 was declared to continue "the civil Constitution of the State, under the sole authority of the People tlhereof, independent of any King or Prince whatsoever; and then two or three familiar fundamental rtiles of liberty and good government were added as a part of it. Under this the people of Connecticut lived till 1818. In Rhode Island the charter, unaltered, served their turn until 1842 ; anid, as is well known, it was tupon this that one of tlhe early cases of judicial action arose for enforcing constitutional provisions under the new order of tlhings, as against a legislative Act; namely, the case of Trevett v. Weeden, in the Rhode Island Suprenme Court in. 1786. [1]
But it is instructive to see that this new application of judicial power wvas not universally assented to. It was denied by several mernbers of the Federal convention, and was referred to as unsettled by various judges in the last two decades of the last century. The surprise of the Rhode Island legislature at the action of the court in Trevett v. Weeden seems to indicate an impression in their minds that the change from colonial dependence to inde- pendence had made the legislature the substitute for Parliament, with a like omnipotence.[2] In Vermont it seems to have been the established doctrine of the period that the judiciary could not dis-regard a legislative Act; and the same view was held in Connec-
- ↑ Varnum's Report of the case (Providence, 1787); S. C. 2 Chandler's Crim. Trials, 269.
- ↑ And so of the excitement aroused by the alleged setting aside of a legislative Act in New York in 1784, in the case of Rutgers v. Waddington. Dawson's edition of this case, "With an Historical Introduction" (Morrisania, 1866), pp. xxiv et seq. In an "Address to the People of the State," issued by the committee of a public meeting of "the violent Whigs," it was declared (pp. xxxiii) "That there should be a power vested in Courts of Judicature, whereby they might conitrol the Supreme Legislativ power, we think is absurd in itself. Such powers in courts would be destructive of liberty, and remove all security of property. "For the reference to this case, and a number of others, I am indebted to a learned article on "The Relation of the Judiciary to the Conistitution" (19 Am. Law Rev. 175) by William M. Meigs, Esq., of the Philadelphia bar. It gives all the earliest cases. As Mr. Meigs remarks, the New York case does not appear to be really one of holding a law unconstitutional.
