Page:Address of Frederick V. Holman at Oregon Bar Association annual meeting.djvu/42

 laws which shall prescribe the notice that brings parties into Court. If no notice is provided by law, no effective notice can be given, since a notice not authorized can have no legal force, and, without a notice authorized by some valid statute, there can be no due process of law. The Courts have no right to supply the omission by interpolating provisions, for it is their duty to give effect to the statutes as they are written, and they cannot amend imperfect enactments."

As a matter of strict constitutional law, under the amendments of 1906, can any Oregon municipality give to itself the right to exercise any sovereign powers not granted to it by its charter from the Legislature? Must not the right to exercise these sovereign powers be granted by amendment of the Constitution made by the legal voters of the whole State of Oregon, not only to municipal corporations in existence when these amendments were adopted, but tO' those created thereafter? And thus prevent the abuse of the exercise of these powers by municipalities, to the prejudice of the rights of the rest of the people of the State.

And thus it must have come that the Oregon Supreme Court found itself in a position where it must either hold said initiative amendments of 1906, relating to municipalities, void for uncertainty or relating only to its business affairs, or otherwise, in order to make them workable and not "in violation of our fundamental law," and to amend them by judicial decisions, or, in the language of the Court, to "read into them" appropriate words and phrases and limitations. And so we have the decision in Straw v. Harris. But that case does not settle all the questions that must arise under these initiative amendments, which themselves "are in violation of our fundamental law."

I have treated of some, only, of the questions involved in these initiative amendments to the Oregon Constitution relating to the amendments of charters of municipal corporations. I have the highest respect for the Oregon Supreme Court and for the learned lawyers who' are its Justices. They have had legal problems that are not easy tO' solve in the cases involving these amendments of the Oregon Constitution which they have had to decide. Whatever may be their views, or those of the Oregon Bar Association, as to the advisability of adopting these amendments, they are parts of the Oregon Constitution and must be respected accordingly.