Hodge v The Queen is a Canadian constitutional law decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1883, at that time the highest court of appeal in the British Empire, including Canada.

The case was the first time that the Judicial Committee considered the constitutional status of the provincial legislatures as a general matter of principle, rather than the case-by-case analysis that had been used up to that point.

The case is also significant because it was the first time the Judicial Committee set out the constitutional principle of double aspect under the division of powers between the federal Parliament and the provincial legislatures.

In May 1881, he was convicted by a magistrate for allowing a billiard table to be used during the hours when the sale of liquor was prohibited, after 7 o'clock in the evening on a Saturday, contrary to the act and regulations.

Hodge's counsel argued that the legislature was simply a delegate of the British Parliament, and therefore could not sub-delegate its legislative powers to the liquor commissioners.

When the British North America Act enacted that there should be a legislature for Ontario, and that its legislative assembly should have exclusive authority to make laws for the Province and for provincial purposes in relation to the matters enumerated in sect.

92, it conferred powers not in any sense to be exercised by delegation from or as agents of the Imperial Parliament, but authority as plenary and as ample within the limits prescribed by sect.

Within these limits of subjects and area the local legislature is supreme, and has the same authority as the Imperial Parliament, or the Parliament of the Dominion, would have had under like circumstances to confide to a municipal institution or body of its own creation authority to make by-laws or resolutions as to subjects specified in the enactment, and with the object of carrying the enactment into operation and effect.

It was noted that: the powers intended to be conferred by the Act in question, when properly understood, are to make regulations in the nature of police or municipal regulations of a merely local character for the good government of taverns... and such as are calculated to preserve, in the municipality, peace and public decency, and repress drunkenness and disorderly and riotous conduct.

The Act, however, also touched on powers that were exclusively in the authority of the federal government, as had been recently determined in Russell v. The Queen.