It is not too much to assert, that the legislature of New Hampshire would
not have been competent to pass the acts in question, and to make them
binding on the plaintiffs without their assent, even if there had been, in
the Constitution of New Hampshire, or of the United States, no special
restriction on their power, because these acts are not the exercise of a
power properly legislative. Their effect and object are to take away, from
one, rights, property, and franchises, and to grant them to another. This
is not the exercise of a legislative power. To justify the taking away of
vested rights there must be a forfeiture, to adjudge upon and declare
which is the proper province of the judiciary. Attainder and confiscation
are acts of sovereign power, not acts of legislation. The British
Parliament, among other unlimited powers, claims that of altering and
vacating charters; not as an act of ordinary legislation, but of
uncontrolled authority. It is theoretically omnipotent. Yet, in modern
times, it has very rarely attempted the exercise of this power.

The legislature of New Hampshire has no more power over the rights of the
plaintiffs than existed somewhere, in some department of government,
before the Revolution. The British Parliament could not have annulled or
revoked this grant as an act of ordinary legislation. If it had done it at
all, it could only have been in virtue of that sovereign power, called
omnipotent, which does not belong to any legislature in the United States.
The legislature of New Hampshire has the same power over this charter
which belonged to the king who granted it, and no more. By the law of
England, the power to create corporations is a part of the royal
prerogative. By the Revolution, this power may be considered as having
devolved on the legislature of the State, and it has accordingly been
exercised by the legislature. But the king cannot abolish a corporation,
or new-model it, or alter its powers, without its assent. This is the
acknowledged and well-known doctrine of the common law.