Concept information
Preferred term
retroactivity
Definition
- Although some commentators praise the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in “updating” the Constitution, one difficulty of this approach is deciding what the Court should do about past cases when it mandates a new policy or procedure. By contrast, the English legal commentator William Blackstone summarized the common law rule that courts were not supposed to “pronounce a new law, but to maintain and expound the old one” (quoted in LaFave 2004, vol. [Source: Encyclopedia of the Fourth Amendment; Retroactivity]
Broader concept
Belongs to group
URI
https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/retroactivity
{{label}}
{{#each values }} {{! loop through ConceptPropertyValue objects }}
{{#if prefLabel }}
{{/if}}
{{/each}}
{{#if notation }}{{ notation }} {{/if}}{{ prefLabel }}
{{#ifDifferentLabelLang lang }} ({{ lang }}){{/ifDifferentLabelLang}}
{{#if vocabName }}
{{ vocabName }}
{{/if}}