Amanar - Try poking around
http://www.law.cornell.edu/ a bit. There are a lot of good cases that pop up if you search on things like "Norton v. Shelby County", "de facto officer", "de jure office", etc. From a quick glance around, it seems like Norton has been pretty heavily watered down by now, if not outright overturned. See
Lemon v. Kurtzman (1973), for example:
Quote:
Appellants urge, as they did in the District Court, a strange amalgam of flexibility and absolutism. Appellants assure us that they do not seek to require the schools to disgorge prior payments received under Act 109; in the same breath, appellants insist that the presently disputed payment be enjoined because an unconstitutional statute 'confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.' Norton v. Shelby County, 118 U.S. 425, 442, 6 S.Ct. 1121, 1125, 30 L.Ed. 178 (1886). Conceding that we have receded from Norton in a host of criminal decisions and in other recent constitutional decisions relating to municipal bonds, appellants nevertheless view those precedents as departures from the established norm of Norton. We disagree.
The process of reconciling the constitutional interests reflected in a new rule of law with reliance interests founded upon the old is 'among the most difficult of those which have engaged the attention of courts, state and federal . . ..' Chicot County Drainage Dist. v. Baxter State Bank, 308 U.S. 371, 374, 60 S.Ct. 317, 319, 84 L.Ed. 329 (1940). Consequently, our holdings in recent years have emphasized that the effect of a given constitutional ruling on prior conduct 'is subject to no set 'principle of absolute retroactive invalidity' but depends upon a consideration of 'particular relations . . . and particular conduct . . . of rights claimed to have become vested, of status, of prior determinations deemed to have finality'; and 'of public policy in the light of the nature both of the statute and of its previous application." Linkletter, supra, 381 U.S., at 627, 85 S.Ct., at 1736, quoting from Chicot County Drainage Dist., supra, 308 U.S., at 374, 60 S.Ct., at 319. However appealing the logic of Norton may have been in the abstract, its abandonment reflected our recognition that statutory or even judge-made rules of law are hard facts on which people must rely in making decisions and in shaping their conduct. This fact of legal life underpins our modern decisions recognizing a doctrine of nonretroactivity. Appellants offer no persuasive reason for confining the modern approach to those constitutional cases involving criminal procedure or municipal bonds, and we ourselves perceive none.
...
In the end, then, appellants' position comes down to this: that any reliance whatever by the schools was unjustified because Act 109 was an 'untested' state statute whose validity had never been authoritatively determined. The short answer to this argument is that governments must act if they are to fulfill their high responsibilities. As one scholar has observed, the diverse state governments were preserved by the Framers 'as separate sources of authority and organs of administration—a point on which they hardly had a choice.' H. Wechsler, Principles, Politics, and Fundamental Law 50 (1961).
Appellants ask, in effect, that we hold those charged with executing state legislative directives to the peril of having their arrangements unraveled if they act before there has been an authoritative judicial determination that the governing legislation is constitutional. Appellants would have state officials stay their hands until newly enacted state programs are 'ratified' by the federal courts, or risk draconian, retrospective decrees should the legislation fall. In our view, appellants' position could seriously undermine the initiative of state legislators and executive officials alike. Until judges say otherwise, state officers—the officers of Pennsylvania—have the power to carry forward the directives of the state legislature. Those officials may, in some circumstances, elect to defer acting until an authoritative judicial pronouncement has been secured; but particularly when there are no fixed and clear constitutional precedents, the choice is essentially one of political discretion and one this Court has never conceived as an incident of judicial review. We do not engage lightly in post hoc evaluation of such political judgment, founded as it is on 'one of the first principles of constitutional adjudication—the basic presumption of the constitutional validity of a duly enacted state or federal law.' San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, at 60, 93 S.Ct. 1278, at 1311, 36 L.Ed.2d 16 (1973) (Stewart, J., concurring).
You know, poking around in some of these cases is starting to jog my memory of Con Law a bit. If I remember correctly, the Court's doctrines regarding the retroactivity of rulings on Constitutional matters are kind of all over the map. Sometimes, the Court requires that a new Constitutional interpretation be applied retroactively, whereas other times the new rule only applies prospectively. And yes, in criminal matters, that means that sometimes people who were convicted under an old Constitutional interpretation stay in prison even though they might not have been convicted under the new interpretation. Can't believe I'd forgotten that; I remember now being thoroughly appalled when we were discussing it in my Con Law class back in the day.
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