Opinion ID: 1532443
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Legislative Interference With Specific Cases Prohibited

Text: Federalist No. 81 also explained that the separation of powers in the proposed federal Constitution would preclude the national legislature from interfering with a particular case, in exactly the same way that the state constitutions prohibited such legislative interference. A legislature without exceeding its province cannot reverse a determination once made, in a particular case; though it may prescribe a new rule for future cases. This is the principle, and it applies in all its consequences, exactly in the same manner and extent, to the state governments, as to the national government, now under consideration. Not the least difference can be pointed out in any view of the subject. [30] Thus, in 1792, James Madison was describing the separation of powers doctrine as a first principle of free government. [31] That same year, Delaware adopted a new Constitution, after a convention over which John Dickinson presided. [32] Under Dickinson's formulation, Delaware's 1792 Constitution again separated its powers of government by keeping them both distinct in department and distinct in office, and yet connected in operation. [33] As Dickinson observed, in a well-regulated state, judges ought to be equally independent of the executive and legislative powers. [34] Both federal and state judicial decisions, in the first few decades after ratification of the United States Constitution and the adoption of Delaware's 1792 Constitution, reflect a consensus that the principle of separation of powers prohibited legislative interference with the judgments of American courts in specific cases. In Calder v. Bull, [35] the Connecticut legislature had enacted a statute that set aside the final judgment of a state court in a civil case. The sole issue before the United States Supreme Court was the construction of the Ex Post Facto Clause of the United States Constitution. Nevertheless, Justice Iredell, a leading Federalist who led the United States Constitution to ratification in North Carolina, noted: the Legislature of [Connecticut] has been in the uniform, uninterrupted, habit of exercising a general superintending power over its courts of law, by granting new trials. It may, indeed, appear strange to some of us, that in any form, there should exist a power to grant, with respect to suits depending or adjudged, new rights of trial, new privileges of proceeding, not previously recognized and regulated by positive institutions.... The power ... is judicial in its nature; and whenever it is exercised, as in the present instance, it is an exercise of judicial, not of legislative, authority. [36] The decisions of the highest state courts during that period reflect the same understanding of the separation of powers. In Bates v. Kimball, [37] for example, a special act of the Vermont Legislature authorized a party to appeal from the judgment of a court even though the time for appeal had expired. The Vermont Supreme Court framed the question before it as: Have the Legislature power to vacate or annul an existing judgment between party and party? [38] The answer was unequivocal: The necessity of a distinct and separate existence of the three great departments of government ... had been proclaimed and enforced by ... Blackstone, Jefferson and Madison, and had been sanctioned by the people of the United States, by being adopted in terms more or less explicit, into all their written constitutions. [39] Citing the United States Supreme Court's decision in Hayburn's Case, [40] the Vermont Supreme Court held that the power to annul a final judgment was an assumption of Judicial power, and, therefore, forbidden. [41]