to declare acts of the legislature
unconstitutional. In a Virginia case as early as 1782 the judges of the
court of appeals expressed the opinion "that the court had power to
declare any resolution or act of the legislature, or of either branch of
it, to be unconstitutional and void."[65] The court, however, did not
exercise the power to which it laid claim. It merely declared a
resolution of the House of Delegates invalid on the ground that it had
been rejected by the Senate. This case is important only as showing that
the court was then paving the way for the exercise of the power to annul
acts of the legislature.

The case of Trevett v. Weeden, decided by the Superior Court of
Judicature of Rhode Island in September, 1786, is said to be the first
in which a law was declared null and void on the ground that it was
unconstitutional.[66] The court in this case did not expressly say that
the law in question was unconstitutional and therefore void, but it
refused to recognize its validity. The power which the court exercised
to ignore a legislative act was promptly repudiated by the law-making
body, and at the expiration of their term of office a few months later,
the judges responsible for this decision were replaced by others. In
1786 or 1787 a case was decided in Massachusetts, and also one in New
Jersey, in which it is claimed that the court declared a legislative act
null and void.

The first reported case in which an act of a legislature was held to be
contrary to a _written_ constitution is that of Bayard v. Singleton,
decided by the Superior Court of North Carolina in May, 1787. James
Iredell, afterward a member of the North Carolina convention, held to
ratify the Constitution, and a judge of the United States Supreme Court,
and William R. Davie, one of the framers of the Constitution, were
attorneys for the plaintiff, the party in whose interest the law was
declared unconstitutional. This decision received much adverse criticism
at the time. The judges "were fiercely denounced as usurpers of power.
Spaight, afterwards governor, voiced a common notion when he declared
that 'the state was subject to the three individuals, who united in
their own persons the legislative and judicial power, which no monarch
in England enjoys, which would be more despotic than the Roman
triumvirate and equally insufferable.'"[67]

Iredell, in a letter to Spaight written August 26, 1787, defended the
decision as a means of limiting