A device for obtaining the same end--the views of the judges in advance of the enactment of a law--in a different way, has been from the first quite common. This is for the legislature to ask them specially for their opinion as to the constitutionality of a bill before it is put upon its passage. An analogous practice has always obtained in England, and was followed in several of the colonies. Some of our State Constitutions expressly authorize such proceedings. In the absence of such authority, the judges can properly decline to comply with the request. It always asks them to prejudge a question which may later come before them in court, and to prejudge it without hearing any of the parties whom it may affect injuriously.[Footnote: See the Reply of the Judges of the Supreme Court of the General Assembly, 33 Conn. Reports, 586.] President Washington, in 1793, brought a matter of this kind before the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was during the controversy with M. Genet, the French minister, as to his right to refit a captured English merchantman as a privateer at an American port, and then send her out for a cruise. By the advice of his Cabinet, the President asked the justices a series of questions comprehending all the subjects of difference as to the proper exposition of the provisions of our treaties with France under which her minister made claim. They replied that they deemed it improper to enter the field of politics by declaring their opinions on questions not growing out of some case actually before them.[Footnote: Marshall, "Life of Washington," V, 433, 441.] No further request of this kind has since been made by any of the political departments to a court of the United States, except such as have been addressed to the Court of Claims. Idaho, in her Constitution (Art. V, Sec. 25), has sought to give the legislature the benefit of judicial advice at the opening of each session as to what laws it might be desirable to enact. The judges of her trial courts are annually to report to those of her Supreme Court such defects and omissions in the laws as their knowledge and experience may suggest, and the latter, after considering these suggestions, are then, within the next five months, to report to the Governor such defects and omissions, both in the Constitution and in the laws, as they may find to exist. The duty of the judiciary, in the course of lawsuits, to compare a statute, the validity of which is called in question, with the Constitution, and by the decision indirectly to affect legislation, is treated of elsewhere.[Footnote: Chap. VII.]