The power to tax is the power to destroy.

No one imagines that a law professing to tax will be permitted to destroy.

It is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society; the application of those rules to individuals in society would seem to be the duty of other departments.

The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their will.

The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. This is the very essence of judicial duty.

The institution of Masonry ought to be abandoned as one capable of much evil, and incapable of producing any good which might not be affected by safe and open means.

When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights.