Weill v. Kenfield

In bank, McKinstry, J.: In the view we take of this application* it becomes unnecessary to decide that this Court has or has not original jurisdiction to issue the writ of mandamus.

The important question presented is, whether every bill introduced into either House of the Legislature, (unless the requirement in that regard of § 15, art. 4, of the Constitution is dispensed with by a two-thirds vote duly recorded) must be read three times; or whether the requirement has been complied with by reading the title and a portion of a bill twice, and reading the whole once. The section reads as follows:

“ No law shall be passed except by bill. Nor shall any bill be put upon its final passage until the same, with the amendments thereto, shall have been printed for the use of the members ; nor shall any bill become a law unless the same be read on three several days in each House, unless, in case of urgency, two-tliirds of the House, where such bill may be pending, shall, by a vote of yeas and nays, dispense with this provision. Any bill may originate in either House, but may be amended or rejected by the other; and on the final passage of all bills they shall be read at length, and the vote shall be by yeas and nays upon each bill separately, and shall be entered on the Journal; and no bill shall become a law without the concurrence of a majority of the members elected to each House.”

It is claimed by petitioner that the words “ be read ” in the clause “ nor shall any bill become a law unless the same be read [113]on three several days,” etc., should receive an interpretation “ technical ” and special. It is admitted that all bills—unless the provision is dispensed with—must be read on three several days, but it is insisted that the framers of the Constitution, and the people who ratified that instrument, must have intended that all bills should be read in the manner, and to the extent only, that it had been the legislative practice to read them prior to the adoption of the Constitution.

When, however, a word is found in a section of the Constitution or of a statute, such as is sometimes employed in a sense specially appropriate to a science, art, or business, and which differs from its popular signification, the courts will accord to it its popular meaning, unless the very nature of the subject indicates or the context suggests that it is employed in its technical sense. And this presumption, that language is used with the meaning ordinarily attached to it, is perhaps strengthened in the present case, where the admitted purpose was to regulate, in the organic law, the mode of proceeding in respect to the passage of bills through the two Houses of the Legislature, and to correct abuses which had grown up under the practice previously existing. It cannot be presumed, at least, that the members of the Constitutional Convention, whose duty it was to prepare an instrument to be submitted to the people, and who liad, therefore, received the direction “ loquendum ut vztlgus,” intended to employ words, (the commonly received meaning of which is indisputable) in a sense peculiar to Cushing’s Manual, or in a sense (if there be such) in which they constitute a portion of the technology of the science of parliamentary law.