is a prerogative writ issued by a court which orders someone to show what authority they have for exercising some right, power, or franchise they claim to hold.

[1] From 1218 onwards,[2] royal Eyres also began using the old writ of quo warranto – a court order to show proof of authority, as for example (literally) "By what warrant are you the sheriff?"

[5] A similar ambiguity surrounds the role of the justices that, from 1278 to 1294, Edward dispatched throughout the Kingdom of England to inquire "by what warrant" English lords claimed their liberties and exercised jurisdiction, including the right to hold a court and collect its profits.

Some of the justices demanded written proof in the form of charters, others accepted a plea of "immemorial tenure";[9] and resistance[10] and the unrecorded nature of many grants meant that eventually, by the Statute of Quo Warranto (18 Edw.

1) (1290), the principle was generally accepted that those rights peacefully exercised since 1189 – the beginning of the reign of Richard I, which is the legal definition in England of the phrase "time immemorial"[6][11] – were legitimate.

[20]In 1876, the Pennsylvania senate passed a resolution instructing the Attorney General to begin quo warranto proceedings to revoke the charter of the Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York Railroad.

[24] Indeed, this is the only way the term is used in law professor Ernesto C. Salao's[note 2] widely cited 858-page book The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines (2001 ed.).

Instead of removing Sereno from office by the mechanism of impeachment, Callida chose to use what one justice called this "road less travelled" of quo warranto.