to a denial or obstruction of the rights accruing by a contract, though professing to act only on the remedy, is directly obnoxious to the prohibition of the Constitution." Thus a law giving interest on debts which carried no interest when they were contracted, or a law authorising the compulsory purchase of ground rents (leasehold enfranchisement), on payment of a sum in gross, have been held to be ultra vires. So a Homestead Exemption Law, or a law increasing the limit of the value of exempted property, cannot be made applicable to debts existing before the passing of the law. But changes which merely affect the legal remedy are not ultra vires, unless, indeed, they attempt to deprive one of the contracting parties of his legal remedy altogether, as when persons who had participated in the rebellion were declared incapable of maintaining suits. A law which forbids property taken in execution to be sold for less than two-thirds its appraised value is void as to contracts made under a state of the law which allowed the property to be sold to the highest bidder. When a statute took away from mortgagees the right of possession until after foreclosure, it was held that this deprived the mortgagee of the right to add to his security by the perception of rents and profits, and subjected him to a new risk of depreciation in its value. So laws extending the time of redemption after foreclosure, or staying execution for an indefinite period, or forfeiting charters for acts not causing forfeiture at the time of the grant, or repealing a statute which made

shareholders in a company liable for its debts, have been held void as impairing the obligation of contracts. Even in the case of actions for the purchase price of slaves, brought after the Emancipation on contracts made before it, a State Constitution declaring such contracts to be no longer enforceable has been held invalid.

One of the most curious examples of the operation of the rule is to be found in its application to laws dealing with insolvency. The States may legislate on this subject so long as Congress does not pass a general law; but State laws of insolvency "discharging the personal property of the debtor, and thereby terminating the legal obligation of the debts, cannot constitutionally be made to apply to contracts entered into before they were passed." Moreover, while contracts made within a State between its own citizens will be held to have reference to the insolvency laws in existence at the date of contract, no such presumption will be made in the case of contracts within the State to which strangers are parties, nor to contracts made without the State between a citizen and a stranger, or even between two citizens, although this last limitation appears to be doubtful. And the fact that payment is to be made within a State does not subject the contract to the insolvency laws of that State.

Scarcely less important, and very similar in effect, is the restriction contained in the 14th Amendment, that "no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any

person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." "Due process of law" means much more than merely regular procedure authorised by statute. It means compliance with certain principles of justice which have not been very precisely defined. "It is intended," says Mr. Justice Johnson in the Supreme Court, "to secure the individual from the arbitrary exercise of the powers of Government unrestrained by the established principles of private rights and distributive justice." As applied to property, the restraints are summed up by Mr. Cooley as follows: "That when specific property is taken, a pecuniary compensation, agreed upon or determined by judicial inquiry, must be paid; and in other cases property can only be taken for the support of the Government, and each citizen can only be required to contribute his proportion to that end. But there is no rule or principle known to our system under which private property can be taken from one person and transferred to another for the private use and benefit of such other person, whether by general law or by special enactment. The purpose must be public, and must have reference to the needs and convenience of the public; and no reason of general public policy will be sufficient to validate other transfers when they concern existing vested rights." But courts do not regard rights as vested contrary to the justice and equity of the case, as when a grantor in an invalid conveyance desires to take advantage of its invalidity. Retrospective legislation, intended to cure invalid contracts, or to give effect to the intention

of parties which had failed through some want of compliance with the existing law, is entirely constitutional, and a contracting party has no vested interest in the defect which the Legislature is bound to respect. But when he has parted with his property, after the invalid conveyance was made to a third and innocent person, the Legislature cannot, by validating the first conveyance, take away the rights of the latter. The line of vested rights which the State in its legislation must not cross is indicated by the two following contrasted

cases.

A statute of the State of Kentucky proposed to compel owners of wild lands to make improvements therein within a specified time, on pain of the lands being forfeited to the State. This statute was held judicially to be unconstitutional. Mr. Cooley's conclusion is significant :

"It would be difficult to frame, consistently with the general principles of free government, a plausible argument in support of such a statute. It was not an exercise of the right of eminent domain. It was not taxation. . . . It was not a police regulation. It was purely and simply a law to forfeit a man's property if he failed to improve it according to a standard which

the Legislature had prescribed. To such a power, if

possessed by the Government, there could be no limit but the legislative discretion; and if defensible on principle, then a law which should authorise the officer to enter a man's dwelling and seize and confiscate his furniture if it fell below, or his food if it exceeded, an established legal standard would be equally so." "* And

* Cooley's "Constitutional Limitations," p. 477.

he declares" that the right of every man to do what he will with his own, not interfering with the reciprocal rights of others, is accepted among the fundamentals of our law."

In other words, the constitutional provision we have been discussing renders null and of no effect all attempted legislation by the States in the direction. indicated.

On the other hand, what are termed betterment laws are pronounced to be constitutional. They provide, as in the example given by Mr. Cooley, that when a man has been ejected from land to which he bona fide believed that he had a good title, he should be entitled to recover from the successful plaintiff the value of any improvements which he had made during his period of possession. But the benefit of the law was not given to one who had entered under a contract unless the owner had failed to fulfil the contract on his part. The principle, however, appears to have been jealously watched, and an Act which permitted the occupying claimant either to demand the value of his improvements or to pay to the successful plaintiff the value of the land minus the value of the improvements was held to be unconstitutional, as a palpable violation of the right of private property.

Another remarkable example of the restrictive intent which is now held to reside in the simple provisions of the Federal Constitution is to be found in the question started by Mr. Cooley, whether a State Legislature could