no
excuse for a judge; it is changing the nature of his crime; it is not
absolving. It must be such error as a wise and conscientious judge may
possibly fall into, and must arise from one or both these causes:--1. A
plausible principle of law; 2. The precedents of respectable
authorities, and in good times. In the first, the principle of law, that
the judge is to decide on law, the jury to decide on fact, is an ancient
and venerable principle and maxim of the law; and if supported in this
application by precedents of good times and of good men, the judge, if
wrong, ought to be corrected,--he ought not to be reproved or to be
disgraced, or the authority or respect to your tribunals to be impaired.
In cases in which declaratory bills have been made, where by violence
and corruption some fundamental part of the Constitution has been struck
at, where they would damn the principle, censure the persons, and annul
the acts,--but where the law has been by the accident of human frailty
depraved or in a particular instance misunderstood, where you neither
mean to rescind the acts nor to censure the persons, in such cases you
have taken the explanatory mode, and, without condemning what is done,
you direct the future judgment of the court.

All bills for the reformation of the law must be according to the
subject-matter, the circumstances, and the occasion, and are of four
kinds:--1. Either the law is totally wanting, and then a new enacting
statute must be made to supply that want; or, 2. it is _defective_, then
a new law must be made to enforce it; 3. or it is opposed by power or
fraud, and then an act must be made to declare it; 4. or it is rendered
doubtful and controverted, and then a law must be made to explain it.
These must be applied according to the exigence of the case: one is just
as good as another of them. Miserable indeed would be the resources,
poor and unfurnished the stores and magazines of legislation, if we were
bound up to a little narrow form, and not able to frame our acts of
Parliament according to every disposition of our own minds and to every
possible emergency of the commonwealth,--to make them declaratory,
enforcing, explanatory, repealing, just in what mode or in what degree
we please.

Those who think that the judges living and dead are to be condemned,
that your tribunals of justice are to be dishonored, that their acts and
judgments on this business are to be rescinded,--they will undoubtedly
vo