repeal
Repeal is the rescission of an existing law by subsequent legislation or constitutional amendment. Repeal is also referred to as abrogation. A repeal can be explicit or implicit. For example, the Twenty-First Amendment explicitly repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, thereby ending the prohibition on the production and importation of alcohol.
More commonly, however, a legislative body will repeal existing legislation through the jurisdiction’s constitutionally proscribed legislative process. For example, in the 1995 National Highway Designation Act, Congress explicitly repealed the 1974 National Maximum Speed Law in the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which set the maximum speed limit to 55 miles per hour in the United States.
Implicit repeal, also referred to as repeal by implication, occurs when a legislative act conflicts with an existing law, but the legislature did not explicitly repeal the existing law. While the later act supersedes the existing ones, effectively repealing them, courts generally disfavor construing legislative acts to implicitly repeal existing laws.
As the California Supreme Court in Penziner v. West American Finance Co., 10 Cal. 2d 160 (1937) explained, “[t]he presumption is against repeals by implication, especially where the prior act has been generally understood and acted upon.” The Court required that, to find implicit repeal, “the two acts must be irreconcilable, clearly repugnant, and so inconsistent that the two cannot have concurrent operation.”
For example, in State v. Davidson, 309 P.2d 211 (1957), the Idaho Supreme Court found that a later negligent homicide law had repealed an earlier involuntary manslaughter statute by implication because the two acts were essentially identical, except for the punishment imposed upon conviction.
[Last reviewed in August of 2026 by the Wex Definitions Team]
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