_ Mahon, 1 Barr,
364.)

Lord Bacon says of retrospective laws: "_Cujus generis leges raro et
magna cum cautione sunt adhibenda: neque enim placet Janus in legibus._"
Without any saving clause may the epithet and denunciation be applied to
judicial laws. They are always _retrospective_, but worse on many
accounts than _retrospective statutes_. Against the latter we have at
least the security of the constitutional provision that prohibits the
passage of any law, which impairs the obligation of a contract,
executory or executed; and it has been well held that this prohibition
applies to such an alteration of the law of evidence in force at the
time the contract was made, as would practically destroy the contract
itself by destroying the only means of enforcing it. There is no such
constitutional provision against judicial legislation. It sweeps away a
man's rights, vested, as he had reason to think, upon the firmest
foundation, without affording him the shadow of redress. Nor could
there, in the nature of things, be any such devised. When a court
overrules a previous decision, it does not simply repeal it; it must
pronounce it never to have been law. There is no instance on record, in
which a court has instituted the inquiry, upon what grounds the suitor
had relied in investing his property or making his contract, and
relieved him from the disastrous consequences, not of his, but of their
mistake, or the mistake of their predecessors. The man who, on the faith
of Steele _v._ The Ph[oe]nix Ins. Co. (3 Binn. 306), decided in 1811,
and treated as so well settled in itself and all its logical
consequences, that in 1832 (Hart _v._ Heilner, 3 Rawle, 407) the Supreme
Court, declined to hear the counsel, who relied on its authority,
invested his money in the purchase of a claim which could be proved only
by the testimony of the assignor, found himself stripped of his property
by a decision in 1845, the results of which were broader than even the
legislature itself would have been competent to effect, or indeed the
people themselves in their sovereign capacity, at least so long as the
Constitution of the United States continues to be "the supreme law of
the land, anything in the _constitution_ and laws of any State to the
contrary notwithstanding."

But judicial is much worse than legislative retrospection in another
aspect. The act of Assembly, if carefully worded, is at least a certain
rule. The act of the judicial legislature