Amendment is necessary because everything decays, even laws. As the English jurist Matthew Hale put it in 1697, “As all sublunary things are subject to corruption and putrefaction, to diseases and rust, so even laws themselves, by long tract of time gather certain diseases and excrescences, certain abuses and corruptions grow into the law, as close as the ivy unto the tree, or the rust to the iron, and in a little tract of time gain the reputation of being part of the law.”
