of legislation in
this country amply demonstrates the wisdom, and even necessity, of
extending the same prohibition to civil cases. There is no particular
or partial inconvenience, which could outweigh the general benefits of a
provision that no law, public or private, should operate retrospectively
upon past acts; that the judgment of the tribunals upon every case
should be according to the law as it was at the time of the transaction,
which the parties were bound to know, and in accordance with which they
are to be presumed to have acted.

As well in the domain of public as of private law, the great fundamental
principle for judge and counsellor ought to be, THAT AUTHORITY IS
SACRED. There is no inconvenience so great, no private hardship so
imperative, as to justify the application of a different rule to the
resolution of a case, than the existing state of the law will warrant.
"There is not a line from his pen," says Mr. Binney of Chief Justice
Tilghman, "that trifles with the sacred deposit in his hands by claiming
to fashion it according to a private opinion of what it ought to be.
Judicial legislation he abhorred, I should rather say, _dreaded_, as an
implication of his conscience. His first inquiry in every case was of
the oracles of the law for their response; and when he obtained it,
notwithstanding his clear perception of the justice of the cause, and
his intense desire to reach it, if it was not the justice of the law, he
dared not to administer it. He acted upon the sentiment of Lord Bacon,
that it is the foulest injustice to remove landmarks, and that to
corrupt the law is to poison the very fountains of justice. With a
consciousness that to the errors of the science there are some limits,
but none to the evils of a licentious invasion of it, he left it to our
annual legislature to correct such defects in the system as time either
created or exposed; and better foundation in the law can no man lay." It
is not to be denied that there is some difficulty in stating with
accuracy the limits of the rule _stare decisis_. One, or even more than
one, recent precedent, especially when it relates to the application
rather than to the establishment of a rule, is not of so binding a
character that it must be followed, even though contrary to principles
adjudged in older cases: but it is just as clear that when a decision
has been long acquiesced in, when it has been applied in numerous cases,
and become a landmark in