Calder v. Bull is the 1798 Supreme Court decision holding that the Constitution’s ban on ex post facto laws applies only to criminal statutes, not civil ones. The case arose from a Connecticut inheritance fight in which the state legislature reopened a closed probate case, and the losing party argued the do-over was an unconstitutional retroactive law. The Court disagreed. Beyond that narrow holding, the case is remembered for a sharp exchange between Justice Samuel Chase and Justice James Iredell over whether courts can strike down laws that violate unwritten principles of natural justice, a debate that still runs through American constitutional law.
The Inheritance Fight That Produced the Case
The dispute centered on Normand Morrison’s 1779 will. In March 1793, a probate court in Hartford, Connecticut disapproved the will and refused to record it. That ruling cut out Caleb Bull and his wife, who claimed under the will, and favored the Calders, who claimed through Mrs. Calder’s status as Morrison’s heir at law.1Justia. Calder v. Bull
Connecticut law gave parties eighteen months to appeal a probate decree. The Bulls let that deadline pass. With no court remedy left, they petitioned the legislature directly, and in May 1795 the legislature passed a resolution setting aside the 1793 decree and granting a new hearing with a fresh six-month appeal window.2The Founders’ Constitution. Calder v. Bull
At the new hearing in July 1795, the probate court approved the will and ordered it recorded. The Calders lost on appeal to the superior court and took the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the legislature’s resolution was an ex post facto law forbidden by Article I, Section 10, which provides that no state shall “pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.”3Constitution Annotated. Article I Section 10
The Holding: Ex Post Facto Means Criminal Only
Justice Chase’s opinion framed the question directly: does the Ex Post Facto Clause reach every retroactive law, or only criminal ones? He answered that the clause covers only criminal and penal legislation, and he set out four categories of retroactive criminal laws the Constitution forbids:
- A law that makes an act criminal when it was legal at the time it was done.
- A law that reclassifies a crime as more serious than it was when committed.
- A law that imposes a harsher punishment than the one that applied when the offense occurred.
- A law that changes the rules of evidence to make conviction easier than it would have been under the rules in force at the time of the act.
Those four categories have served as the governing framework for ex post facto analysis ever since.4Constitution Annotated. ArtI.S10.C1.5 State Ex Post Facto Laws
Because the Connecticut resolution reopened a civil inheritance matter rather than imposing criminal punishment, Chase concluded it fell outside the clause entirely. The Ex Post Facto Clause simply had nothing to say about retroactive changes to property rights, probate proceedings, or civil obligations.4Constitution Annotated. ArtI.S10.C1.5 State Ex Post Facto Laws
All four justices who wrote in the case (Chase, Paterson, Iredell, and Cushing) agreed the Connecticut resolution did not violate the Constitution, though they arrived by different routes.1Justia. Calder v. Bull
Why the Case Is Still Read: Chase Versus Iredell on Natural Law
The reason law students still read Calder v. Bull is not the inheritance holding. It is the disagreement between Chase and Iredell about whether courts can look past the Constitution’s text to enforce unwritten limits on legislative power.
Chase: Some Acts Are Beyond Any Legislature’s Power
Chase argued that certain acts are so unjust that no legislature could lawfully commit them, even without an explicit constitutional prohibition. His examples were vivid: a law punishing someone for an innocent act, a law making a person the judge in his own cause, and “a law that takes property from A. and gives it to B.” In his view, it was “against all reason and justice for a people to entrust a legislature with such powers,” and courts could presume the people never intended to grant them.1Justia. Calder v. Bull
Chase grounded this in the idea of a social compact. Government exists to protect life, liberty, and property, and a legislature that destroyed those things acted outside its delegated authority whatever the written text said. For Chase, this was not philosophy at the margins. Courts had a duty to enforce these unwritten limits.
Iredell: Only the Written Constitution
Iredell disagreed. He acknowledged that “some speculative jurists have held that a legislative act against natural justice must in itself be void,” but he did not believe any court had the power to declare it so.1Justia. Calder v. Bull
His concern was practical. The “ideas of natural justice are regulated by no fixed standard,” he wrote, and the most able and principled people had always disagreed about what natural justice requires. If judges could void laws for offending abstract principle, judicial review would collapse into personal preference, with different judges reaching different results based on their own moral convictions.
The answer, for Iredell, was the written Constitution itself. The American states had carefully defined legislative power and restrained it within “marked and settled boundaries.” If a law violated those written limits, courts could strike it down. If it did not, the judiciary had no business second-guessing the legislature’s judgment, however unwise the law might be.1Justia. Calder v. Bull
What the Case Means for Retroactive Civil Laws
The practical rule from Calder v. Bull is straightforward. The Ex Post Facto Clause does not prevent legislatures from passing retroactive civil laws. Legislatures can reopen settled property disputes, modify inheritance rules, change civil procedures, and adjust private obligations with retroactive effect without running afoul of that particular prohibition.4Constitution Annotated. ArtI.S10.C1.5 State Ex Post Facto Laws
The line between criminal and civil is not always obvious, though. Later decisions make clear that a legislature cannot evade the ex post facto prohibition just by putting a “civil” label on a punitive law. If a statute is criminal in purpose or effect, courts treat it as criminal whatever it is called.5Legal Information Institute. U.S. Constitution Annotated Article I Section 10 Clause 1 State Ex Post Facto Laws
Other constitutional provisions can still reach retroactive civil legislation. The Contract Clause, in the same section of Article I, separately restricts states from impairing the obligation of contracts. Due process protections under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments add another check. And the vested rights doctrine, which grew partly out of Chase’s natural law reasoning, has been invoked to argue that once a right is fully established, later legislation cannot strip it away, though that doctrine has been described as “neither fully discredited nor fully coherent.”6Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Of Brutal Murder and Transcendental Sovereignty: The Meaning of Vested Private Rights
The Long Shadow: Substantive Due Process
The Chase-Iredell exchange did not stay academic. Scholars and courts trace the origins of substantive due process back to it. Chase’s position that legislatures cannot violate fundamental rights even without specific textual authority became the intellectual foundation for later judges who used due process clauses in state constitutions and in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to strike down laws interfering with property and personal liberty.7Constitution Annotated. Amdt5.7.1 Overview of Substantive Due Process Requirements
Iredell’s insistence on the written text became the rallying point for critics of substantive due process. His warning, that allowing judges to define natural justice hands the judiciary nearly unlimited discretion to void laws based on personal philosophy, still shows up in modern opinions rejecting unenumerated rights. The tension has run through American constitutional law from the Lochner era through modern cases on privacy and liberty, and both sides trace their lineage to the two opinions in Calder v. Bull.