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This formal approach to the meaning of due process could obviously have limited both Congress and the state legislatures in the development of procedures unknown to English law. But when California's abandonment of indictment by grand jury was challenged, the Court refused to be limited by the fact that such proceeding was the English practice and that Coke had indicated that it was a proceeding required as "the law of the land." The meaning of the Court in Murray's Lessee was "that a process of law, which is not otherwise forbidden, must be taken to be due process of law, if it can show the sanction of settled usage both in England and in this country; but it by no means follows that nothing else can be due process of law." To hold that only historical, traditional procedures can constitute due process, the Court said, "would be to deny every quality of the law but its age, and to render it incapable[p.1348]of progress or improvement."23 Therefore, in observing the due process guarantee, it was concluded, the Court must look "not [to] particular forms of procedures, but [to] the very substance of individual rights to life, liberty, and property." The due process clause prescribed "the limits of those fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions. . . . It follows that any legal proceeding enforced by public authority, whether sanctioned by age and custom, or newly devised in the discretion of the legislative power, in furtherance of the general public good, which regards and preserves these principles of liberty and justice, must be held to be due process of law."24 http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:zSDVmdAbFyMJ:www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/amdt5bfrag2_user.html+Extending+Due+Process+to+Undisclosed+Evidence&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Since Monroe v. Pape, supra, this Court has consistently avoided attaching any requirement of ulterior purpose or improper motive to the statement of a cause of action under 42 U.S.C.A. 1983. Cf. Nesmith v. Alford, 5 Cir. 1963, 318 F.2d 110; Pierson v. Ray, 5 Cir. 1965, 352 F.2d 213, reversed on other grounds, 386 U.S. 547, 87 S.Ct. 1213, 18 L.Ed.2d 288. Of course, when an essential element of the wrong itself under well established principles of tort law includes the demonstration of an improper motive as in malicious prosecution