If the constitution be not altogether waste-paper, it has restrained the power of the legislature in these particulars.  If it has any meaning, it is that the legislature shall pass no act directly and manifestly impairing private property and private privileges.  It shall not judge by act.  It shall not decide by act.  It shall not deprive by act.  But it shall leave all these things to be tried and adjudged by the law of the land.

The fifteenth article has been referred to before.  It declares that no one shall be “deprived of his property, immunities, or privileges, but by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land.”  Notwithstanding the light in which the learned judges in New Hampshire viewed the rights of the plaintiffs under the charter, and which has been before adverted to, it is found to be admitted in their opinion, that those rights are privileges within the meaning of this fifteenth article of the Bill of Rights.  Having quoted that article, they say:  “That the right to manage the affairs of this college is a privilege, within the meaning of this clause of the Bill of Rights, is not to be doubted.”  In my humble opinion, this surrenders the point.  To resist the effect of this admission, however, the learned judges add:  “But how a privilege can be protected from the operation of the law of the land by a clause in the constitution, declaring that it shall not be taken away but by the law of the land, is not very easily understood.”  This answer goes on the ground, that the acts in question are laws of the land, within the meaning of the constitution.  If they be so, the argument drawn from this article is fully answered.  If they be not so, it being admitted that the plaintiffs’ rights are “privileges,” within the meaning of the article, the argument is not answered, and the article is infringed by the acts.

Are, then, these acts of the legislature, which affect only particular persons and their particular privileges, laws of the land?  Let this question be answered by the text of Blackstone.  “And first it (i.e. law) is a rule:  not a transient, sudden order from a superior to or concerning a particular person; but something permanent, uniform, and universal.  Therefore a particular act of the legislature to confiscate the goods of Titius, or to attaint him of high treason, does not enter into the idea of a municipal law; for the operation of this act is spent upon Titius only, and has no relation to the community in general; it is rather a sentence than a law."[45] Lord Coke is equally decisive and emphatic.  Citing and commenting on the celebrated twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Charta, he says:  “No man shall be disseized, &c., unless it be by the lawful judgment, that is, verdict of equals, or by the law of the land, that is (to speak it once for all), by the due course and process of law."[46] Have the plaintiffs lost their franchises by “due course and process of law”?  On the contrary, are not these acts “particular acts of the legislature, which have no relation to the community in general, and which are rather sentences than laws”?