Obsolete

Fallen into disuse

A term applied to laws which, by change in conditions or subject matter, or by long neglect, have lost their efficacy without being repealed. A positive statute, unrepealed, can never be repealed by nonuser alone.

4 Yeates (Pa.) 181, 215; 1 P. A. Brovrae (Pa. App.) 28; 13 Serg. & R. (Pa.) 447.

The disuse of a law is at most only presumptive evidence that society has consented to such a repeal. However this presumption may operate on an unwritten law, it cannot, in general, act upon one which remains as a legislative act on the statute book, because no presumption can set aside a certainty. A written law may indeed become obsolete when the object to which it was intended to apply, or the occasion for which it was enacted, no longer exists. 1 P. A. Browne (Pa. App.) 28. "It must be a very strong case," says Chief Justice Tilghman, "to justify the court in deciding that an act standing on the statute book, unrepealed, is obsolete and invalid. I will not say that such case may not exist where there has been a nonuser for a great number of years, where, from a change of times and manners, an ancient sleeping statute would do great mischief if suddenly brought into action, where a long practice inconsistent with it has prevailed, and especially where, from other and later statutes, it might be inferred that in the apprehension of the legislature the old one was not in force."

13 Serg. & R. (Pa.) 452; Rutherford, Inst, bk. 2, c. 6, § 19; Merlin, Repert. "Desuetude."