e the ones selected for the purpose.

The absorptive powers of the law of the land clause, the precursor in
the original state constitutions of the historically synonymous due
process clause, was foreshadowed as early as 1819 in a dictum by
Justice William Johnson of the United States Supreme Court:

As to the words from Magna Charta ... after volumes spoken and
written with a view to their exposition, the good sense of
mankind has at length settled down to this: that they were
intended to secure the individual from the arbitrary exercise
of the powers of government, unrestrained by the established
principles of private rights and distributive justice.[62]

Thirty-eight years later, in 1857, the prophecy of these words was
realized in the famous Dred Scott Case,[63] in which Section 8 of the
Missouri Compromise, whereby slavery was excluded from the territories,
was held void under the Fifth Amendment, not on the ground that the
procedure for enforcing it was not due process of law, but because the
Court regarded it as unjust to forbid people to take their slaves, or
other property, into the territories, the common property of all the
States.

Meanwhile, in the previous year (1856) the recently established Court of
Appeals of New York had, in the landmark case of Wynehamer _v._
People,[64] set aside a state-wide prohibition law as comprising, with
regard to liquors in existence at the time of its going into effect, an
act of destruction of property not within the power of government to
perform "even by the forms of due process of law". The term due process
of law, in short, simply drops out of the clause, which comes to read
"no person shall be deprived of property", period. At the same time
Judge Comstock's opinion in the case sharply repudiates all arguments
against the statute sounding in Natural Law concepts, fundamental
principles of liberty, common reason and natural rights, and so forth.
Such theories were subversive of the necessary powers of government.
Furthermore, there was "no process of reasoning by which it can be
demonstrated that the 'Act for the Prevention of Intemperance, Pauperism
and Crime' is void, upon principles and theories outside of the
constitution, which will not also, and by an easier induction, bring it
in direct conflict with the constitution itself."[65] Thus it was
foreshadowed that the law of the land and the due process of law
clauses, which were origi