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529US2

Unit: $U52

[09-26-01 10:36:40] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 513 (2000)

523

Opinion of the Court

Wooddeson’s classiﬁcation divided ex post facto laws into
three general categories: those respecting the crimes them-
selves; those respecting the legal rules of evidence; and
those affecting punishment (which he further subdivided
into laws creating a punishment and those making an ex-
isting punishment more severe).11 See 2 R. Wooddeson, A
Systematical View of the Laws of England 625–640 (1792)
(Lecture 41) (hereinafter Wooddeson). Those three cate-
gories (the last of which was further subdivided) correlate
precisely to Calder’s four categories. Justice Chase also
used language in describing the categories that corre-
sponds directly to Wooddeson’s phrasing.12 Finally, in four

that Wooddeson was William Blackstone’s successor, 3 Dall., at 391 (Black-
stone held the Vinerian chair at Oxford until 1766), and his treatise was
repeatedly cited in the years following the ratiﬁcation by lawyers ap-
pearing before this Court and by the Court itself. See, e. g., Trustees
of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 562–563 (1819) (argu-
ment of Daniel Webster); id., at 668, 676 (Story, J.); Town of Pawlet v.
Clark, 9 Cranch 292, 326, 329 (1815) (Story, J.); The Nereide, 9 Cranch 388,
449 (1815) (Story, J.); Cooper v. Telfair, 4 Dall. 14, 16–17 (1800) (arguments
of Edward Tilghman, Jared Ingersoll, and Alexander Dallas); Hannum v.
Spear, 2 Dall. 291 (Err. App. Pa. 1795); Glass v. Sloop Betsey, 3 Dall. 6,
8 (1794).

11 Speciﬁcally, in the former category Wooddeson included those laws
that make “some innovation, or creat[e] some forfeiture or disability, not
incurred in the ordinary course of law.” 2 R. Wooddeson, A Systematical
View of the Laws of England 638 (1792).
In the latter category, he placed
those laws that “imposed a sentence more severe than could have been
awarded by the inferior courts.”
Id., at 639. As examples of the former
category Wooddeson cited the bills passed by Parliament that banished
Lord Clarendon in 1669 and Bishop Atterbury in 1723. Those punish-
ments were considered “innovation[s] . . . not incurred in the ordinary
course of law” because banishment, at those times, was simply not a form
of penalty that could be imposed by the courts.
Ibid. See 11 W. Holds-
worth, A History of English Law 569 (1938); Craies, The Compulsion of
Subjects to Leave the Realm, 6 L. Q. Rev. 388, 396 (1890).

12 See 2 Wooddeson 631 (referring to laws that “respec[t] the crime,
determining those things to be treason, which by no prior law or adjudi-
cation could be or had been so declared”); id., at 633–634 (referring to
. the rules of evidence [rectifying] a deﬁciency of
laws “respecting .

.