The case of Trevett v. Weeden, decided by the Superior Court of Judicature of Rhode Island in September, 1786, is said to be the first in which a law was declared null and void on the ground that it was unconstitutional.[66] The court in this case did not expressly say that the law in question was unconstitutional and therefore void, but it refused to recognize its validity. The power which the court exercised to ignore a legislative act was promptly repudiated by the law-making body, and at the expiration of their term of office a few months later, the judges responsible for this decision were replaced by others. In 1786 or 1787 a case was decided in Massachusetts, and also one in New Jersey, in which it is claimed that the court declared a legislative act null and void. The first reported case in which an act of a legislature was held to be contrary to a _written_ constitution is that of Bayard v. Singleton, decided by the Superior Court of North Carolina in May, 1787. James Iredell, afterward a member of the North Carolina convention, held to ratify the Constitution, and a judge of the United States Supreme Court, and William R. Davie, one of the framers of the Constitution, were attorneys for the plaintiff, the party in whose interest the law was declared unconstitutional. This decision received much adverse criticism at the time. The judges "were fiercely denounced as usurpers of power. Spaight, afterwards governor, voiced a common notion when he declared that 'the state was subject to the three individuals, who united in their own persons the legislative and judicial power, which no monarch in England enjoys, which would be more despotic than the Roman triumvirate and equally insufferable.'"[67] Iredell, in a letter to Spaight written August 26, 1787, defended the decision as a means of limiting the power of the majority. "I conceive the remedy of a new election," he says, "to be of very little consequence, because this would only secure the views of a majority...."[68] Iredell expressed what was no doubt the real purpose of the judicial veto--the limitation of the power of the majority. In eight of the thirteen states the doctrine that the judiciary could refuse to enforce laws regularly enacted by the legislative body had not even been asserted by the courts themselves, much less recognized and accepted by the people generally. There is no evidence to warrant the belief that this power was anywhere claimed or exercised in response to a popular demand or that it had at this time become a firmly established or generally recognized feature of any state government. This being the case, there is no ground for the contention that the power to annul acts of the legislature was necessarily implied in the general grant of judicial authority contained in the Constitution. Moreover, it was not expressly conferred, for the Constitution as submitted and ratified contains no reference to this power.