Cummings v. Missouri

How later courts described this case

• finding parts of Missouri Constitution violative of ex post facto clause because “as the State, had she attempted the course supposed, would have failed, it must follow that any other mode producing the same result must equally fail.”
• noting that, although "bills [of attainder] are generally directed against individuals by name,” they "may also be directed against a whole class,” as ”[t]he bill against the Earl of Kildare and others, passed in the reign of Henry VIII," which "enacted that ’all such persons which be or heretofore have been comforters, abettors, partakers, confederates, or adherents unto the said' late earl, and certain other parties, who were named, 'in his or their false and traitorous acts and purposes, shall in likewise stand, and be attainted, adjudged, and convicted of high treason’"
• noting that “[i]t is evident from the nature of the pursuits and professions of the parties . . . that many of the acts, from the taint of which they must purge themselves, have no possible relation to their fitness for those pursuits and professions” and that the oath requirement, therefore, “was exacted, not from any notion that the several acts designated indicated unfitness for the callings, but because it was thought that the several acts deserved punishment”
• noting that bills of attainder "are gen- erally directed against individuals by name," and that "[b] ills of this sort. .. have been most usually passed in England in times of rebellion, or gross subservency to the crown, or of violent political excitements; periods, in which all nations are most liable (as well the free as the enslaved) to forget their duties, and to trample upon the rights and liberties of others"

Written by the judges who cited it.