Principles of Federal Appropriations Law - US Government ...

Chapter 2
The Legal Framework
The Court reaffirmed the presumption against retroactivity of statutes in
several recent decisions. E.g., Immigration & Naturalization Service v.
St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001); Martin v. Hadix, 527 U.S. 343 (1999); Lindh v.
Murphy, 521 U.S. 320 (1997); Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244
(1994). In Landgraf, the Court elaborated on the policies supporting the
presumption against retroactivity:
“Because it accords with widely held intuitions about how
statutes ordinarily operate, a presumption against
retroactivity will generally coincide with legislative and
public expectations. Requiring clear intent assures that
Congress itself has affirmatively considered the potential
unfairness of retroactive application and determined that it
is an acceptable price to pay for the countervailing benefits.
Such a requirement allocates to Congress responsibility for
fundamental policy judgments concerning the proper
temporal reach of statutes, and has the additional virtue of
giving legislators a predictable background rule against
which to legislate.”
511 U.S. at 272–273.
Landgraf also resolved the “apparent tension” between the presumption
against retroactivity in its Bowen line of decisions and another decision,
Bradley v. Richmond School Board, 416 U.S. 696 (1974), which held that
when a law changes subsequent to the judgment of a lower court, an
appellate court must apply the new law, that is, the law in effect when it
renders its decision, unless applying the new law would produce “manifest
injustice” or unless there is statutory direction or legislative history to the
contrary. 89 It affirmed that the presumption embraces statutes that have
“genuinely” retroactive effect, by which it meant statutes that apply new
89 Previously, the Court had acknowledged but left unresolved the “apparent tension”
between Bradley and Bowen. See Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp. v. Bonjorno,
494 U.S. 827, 837 (1990).
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