November 23, 2013 10:14AM # Happy Repudiation Day! By [Walter Olson](https://www.cato.org/people/walter-olson) --- SHARE Today (Nov. 23) is Repudiation Day, a special holiday recognized by law in Frederick County, Maryland, where I live. In 1765, judges here “became the first to repudiate the British Stamp Act designed to maintain the costs of keeping British troops in America. \[They\] decided they were not going to charge the tax and refused to stamp the documents … The late Judge Edward Delaplaine called \[them\] the ’12 immortal judges.’ ” More at the [Wikipedia entry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repudiation_Day) and in [this 2006 column](http://www.fredericknewspost.com/archives/article_da251a27-52f7-5ff3-942f-ecc7f4090b7a.html) by Joe Volz at the Frederick News-Post (via [Brian Griffiths, Red Maryland/​Baltimore Sun](http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/red-maryland-blog/bs-ed-rm-repudiation-day-20111123,0,1701543.story)). Can you think of any other holiday that celebrates judicial resistance to overweening government and onerous taxation? I can’t. [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).