The Problem of Local, Private, and Special Legislation in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

Until the midto late-nineteenth century, state legislatures mostly enacted local, private, and special legislation, and very little general legislation. Local legislation refers to statutes that apply to localities rather than to the state as a whole. Private legislation refers to statutes benefitting individuals rather than the general public. Special legislation can be either local or private, and this term will be used throughout this study to describe local and private legislation. General legislation applies to the entire state.1 State legislatures inherited their tradition of special legislation from their colonial antecedents, which, in turn, adopted the practice from Parliament. By the establishment of the English colonies in North America, it was customary in England for individuals and localities to petition Parliament for legislative redress of their particular problems. In solving individual and local problems by legislation, Parliament acted in a quasi-judicial fashion and fashioned elaborate procedures when performing this role. Unlike Parliament, neither colonial, nor later state, legislatures established elaborate procedures that governed special legislation, and by the mid-nineteenth century, this kind of legislation constituted a major obstacle to an efficient legislative process. To remove that obstacle, most states by the end of the nineteenth century or the early twentieth prohibited or restricted much of the special legislation that had routinely been enacted by legislature.2 Before reform the ratio of special to general legislation ranged from three to one to more than ten to one. In 1851 the delegates to the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850-1851 proclaimed that more than two-thirds of the laws enacted since statehood (1816) were special, not