Definition
A formulaic clause inserted in a statute to signal that the new enactment overrides or repeals, to the extent of any conflict, any provision in prior legislation that might otherwise limit or contradict its operation. The phrase functions as a legislative override directive: where the new statute and an earlier act cannot both be given full effect, the new statute controls. It is a specific application of the broader principle that a later law supersedes an earlier inconsistent one (lex posterior derogat priori), but makes that supersession explicit on the face of the text rather than leaving it to inference.
The clause does not repeal prior acts wholesale. It operates only to the extent of actual conflict or inconsistency. Provisions in former acts that are compatible with the new statute remain in force.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with historical statutory material will encounter this clause — and its many near-identical variants — frequently in colonial, early American, and English session laws. Its presence in a statute is a signal to check what earlier legislation may have been partially displaced, even where no formal repeal clause exists. Nineteenth-century statutory compilations often omitted or condensed such clauses in their headnotes, which can obscure the relationship between successive acts on the same subject.
The clause matters most in gap-filling problems: when a later act contains this language but does not specify which prior act it targets, the researcher must reconstruct the prior legislative landscape to determine what was actually overridden. This requires working backward through session laws rather than relying solely on compiled or codified versions, which may already incorporate amendments without flagging the conflict.
Do not assume the clause appears only in major revision acts. It turns up in narrow, subject-specific amendments where the drafter anticipated a potential conflict with a single prior provision. In those cases, the clause's scope is correspondingly narrow.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence treat this clause as a statutory term of art, citing its use in Massachusetts practice (11 Mass. 402). Their entry is spare — little more than an identification of the phrase and its jurisdictional reference — but the citation confirms the clause's active use in early American statutory drafting, not merely as an English inheritance.
The entry as preserved is fragmentary, running directly into a separate entry for APANAGE, with an embedded quotation from Lord Mansfield on apices litigandi. That quotation has no bearing on the clause under discussion; it is an artifact of the dictionary's original pagination rather than interpretive commentary on this term. Researchers should not read any connection between the two entries.
Historical legal dictionaries generally treat this phrase as self-explanatory, devoting little analytical space to it. What they do not address — and what the modern researcher must supply — is the interpretive question of scope: courts in the nineteenth century frequently litigated whether the clause in a given act was broad enough to displace a specific prior provision, or whether the conflict was insufficiently direct to trigger its operation. The clause signals intent; it does not resolve every ambiguity about which prior provisions are affected.
Jurisdictional Note
The clause appears in English, American federal, and American state statutory drafting traditions. Its interpretation follows general rules of statutory construction in each jurisdiction. No single uniform doctrine governs its scope across all American states, and some jurisdictions developed specific rules about whether such a clause could override constitutional or special legislation.