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Still In Exile? The Current Status Of The Contract Clause, James W. Ely
Still In Exile? The Current Status Of The Contract Clause, James W. Ely
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The Contract Clause is no longer the subject of much judicial solicitude or academic interest.' Since the 1930s the once potent Contract Clause has been largely relegated to the outer reaches of constitutional law.2 This, of course, was not always the case. On the contrary, throughout the nineteenth century the Contract Clause was one of the most litigated provisions of the Constitution. In 1896, Justice George Shiras astutely commented: "No provision of the constitution of the United States has received more frequent consideration by this court than that which provides that no state shall pass any law impairing the obligation …
Jeremy Bentham, The Contract Clause And Justice John Archibald Campbell, John R. Schmidhauser
Jeremy Bentham, The Contract Clause And Justice John Archibald Campbell, John R. Schmidhauser
Vanderbilt Law Review
Conflicts between the desire to meet the felt needs of society and the desire to maintain existing property rights have long perplexed modern governments. The methods adopted for the resolution of such conflicts quite naturally reflect the prevailing social and political ideology in each nation. In the United States in the period of the Philadelphia Convention, the prevailing temper, at least among the influential, was one of insistence upon the preservation of the sanctity of private property. This insistence and the widespread public reverence for law and judicial institutions determined that state interference with or modification of private contracts be …