268
Opinion of the Court
tirely benign and legitimate purposes, whether to respond to emergencies, to correct mistakes, to prevent circumvention of a new statute in the interval immediately preceding its passage, or simply to give comprehensive effect to a new law Congress considers salutary. However, a requirement that Congress first make its intention clear helps ensure that Congress itself has determined that the benefits of retroactivity outweigh the potential for disruption or unfairness.
While statutory retroactivity has long been disfavored, deciding when a statute operates "retroactively" is not always a simple or mechanical task. Sitting on Circuit, Justice Story offered an influential definition in Society for Propagation of the Gospel v. Wheeler, 22 F. Cas. 756 (No. 13,156) (CC NH 1814), a case construing a provision of the New Hampshire Constitution that broadly prohibits "retrospective" laws both criminal and civil.22 Justice Story first rejected the notion that the provision bars only explicitly retroactive legislation, i. e., "statutes . . . enacted to take effect from a time anterior to their passage." Id., at 767. Such a construction, he concluded, would be "utterly subversive of all the objects" of the prohibition. Ibid. Instead, the ban on retrospective legislation embraced "all statutes, which, though operating only from their passage, affect vested
Elkhorn Mining Co., 428 U. S. 1, 17 (1976). In this case the punitive damages provision may raise a question, but for present purposes we assume that Congress has ample power to provide for retroactive application of § 102.
22 Article 23 of the New Hampshire Bill of Rights provides: "Retrospective laws are highly injurious, oppressive and unjust. No such laws, therefore, should be made, either for the decision of civil causes or the punishment of offenses." At issue in the Society case was a new statute that reversed a common-law rule by allowing certain wrongful possessors of land, upon being ejected by the rightful owner, to obtain compensation for improvements made on the land. Justice Story held that the new statute impaired the owner's rights and thus could not, consistently with Article 23, be applied to require compensation for improvements made before the statute's enactment. See 22 F. Cas., at 766-769.
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