Samuel Freeman Miller

“ There was a well-understood subject of contract. The corporation wished authority to build a branch road or roads, with favorable route, and power to acquire right of way; and the State wished the vexed question of the right to tax the corporation to be settled. For the company denied the right of the State to tax them under their charter, until the road paid them a net income of seven per cent per annum on its cost. ”

“ It is not easy to see why such a provision should be extended beyond the terms in which it is expressed; and all the force which properly belongs to it is given when the exemption from the constitutional provision against impairing the obligation of contracts is extended as far as the language of the exemption justifies, and it should be extended no further by implication. ”

“ The power thus conferred cannot be limited or bargained away by any act of the legislature, because the power itself is beyond legislative control. The right asserted in this case to amend or repeal legislative grants to corporations, being itself but the expression of the will or purpose of the legislature for one particular session or term of the State of New Jersey, cannot bind any succeeding legislature which may choose to make a grant or a contract not subject to be altered or repealed ”

“ The Assessor, 30 N. L. L. 22, and State v. Bergen, 34 id. 439, are cited.
They announce the general principle that a charter and its amendments are to be considered as acts in pari materia in construing them, and they do little more. The precise point held is, that a city charter, being declared to be a public act, supplements and amendments to it are also to be treated as public acts. But this falls short of establishing the principle that a reservation in a charter to a private corporation, of the right to repeal or amend it, shall extend to every subsequent amendment of the charter. ”