Cite as: 511 U. S. 244 (1994)
Syllabus
weight she would place upon them by negative inference: Her statutory argument would require the Court to assume that Congress chose a surprisingly indirect route to convey an important and easily expressed message. Moreover, the relevant legislative history reveals little to suggest that Members of Congress believed that an agreement had been tacitly reached on the controversial retroactivity issue or that Congress understood or intended the interplay of the foregoing sections to have the decisive effect Landgraf assigns them. Instead, the history conveys the impression that legislators agreed to disagree about whether and to what extent the Act would apply to preenactment conduct. Pp. 257-263. (c) In order to resolve the question left open by the 1991 Act, this Court must focus on the apparent tension between two seemingly contradictory canons for interpreting statutes that do not specify their temporal reach: the rule that a court must apply the law in effect at the time it renders its decision, see Bradley v. School Bd. of Richmond, 416 U. S. 696, 711, and the axiom that statutory retroactivity is not favored, see Bowen v. Georgetown Univ. Hospital, 488 U. S. 204, 208. Pp. 263-265. (d) The presumption against statutory retroactivity is founded upon elementary considerations of fairness dictating that individuals should have an opportunity to know what the law is and to conform their conduct accordingly. It is deeply rooted in this Court's jurisprudence and finds expression in several constitutional provisions, including, in the criminal context, the Ex Post Facto Clause. In the civil context, prospectivity remains the appropriate default rule unless Congress has made clear its intent to disrupt settled expectations. Pp. 265-273. (e) Thus, when a case implicates a federal statute enacted after the events giving rise to the suit, a court's first task is to determine whether Congress has expressly prescribed the statute's proper reach. If Congress has done so, there is no need to resort to judicial default rules. Where the statute in question unambiguously applies to preenactment conduct, there is no conflict between the antiretroactivity presumption and the principle that a court should apply the law in effect at the time of decision. Even absent specific legislative authorization, application of a new statute to cases arising before its enactment is unquestionably proper in many situations. However, where the new statute would have a genuinely retroactive effect—i. e., where it would impair rights a party possessed when he acted, increase his liability for past conduct, or impose new duties with respect to transactions already completed— the traditional presumption teaches that the statute does not govern absent clear congressional intent favoring such a result. Bradley did not displace the traditional presumption. Pp. 273-280.
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