Edward Douglass White

“ The circumstance that congress, in creating a new court of the United States, affixed a different limitation as to the time for prosecuting error to such court, and left unchanged the limitation as to the time within which error might be prosecuted to the courts whose practice in this particular governed the practice in state courts, irresistibly warrants the inference that it was intended that the practice in the state courts as to the time of suing out writs of error should continue unaltered. ”

“ It follows, therefore, that the only reasoning by which it is possible to conclude that the act of 1891 was intended to change the limit of time in which writs of error could issue from the supreme court to the circuit or district courts, or in which appeals could be taken from such courts to the supreme court, would compel to the conclusion that the act of 1891 had expressly preserved the two-years limitation of time then existing as to writs of error from state courts to the supreme court. ”

“ As, however, this is not the case, and as, on the contrary, the words 'no such appeal or writ of error' are clearly but a portion of section 6, it would be an act of the broadest judicial legislation to sever them from their connection in the act in order to give them a scope and significance which their plain import refutes, and which would be in conflict with the meaning naturally begotten by the provision of the act with which the limitation as to time is associated. ”