304
Opinion of the Court
Moreover, § 1981 (and hence § 101) is not limited to employment; because it covers all contracts, see, e. g., Runyon v. McCrary, 427 U. S. 160 (1976), Tillman v. Wheaton-Haven Recreation Assn., Inc., 410 U. S. 431 (1973), a substantial part of § 101's sweep does not overlap Title VII. In short, § 101 has the effect not only of increasing liability but also of establishing a new standard of conduct.3 Accordingly, for reasons we stated in Landgraf, the important new legal obligations § 101 imposes bring it within the class of laws that are presumptively prospective.
III
Petitioners rely heavily on an argument that was not applicable to § 102 of the 1991 Act, the section at issue in Land-graf. They contend that § 101 should apply to their case because it was "restorative" of the understanding of § 1981 that prevailed before our decision in Patterson. Petitioners advance two variations on this theme: Congress' evident purpose to "restore" pre-Patterson law indicates that it affirmatively intended § 101 to apply to cases arising before its enactment; 4 moreover, there is a "presumption in favor of application of restorative statutes" to cases arising before their enactment. Brief for Petitioners 37.
A
Congress' decision to alter the rule of law established in one of our cases—as petitioners put it, to "legislatively overrul[e]," see id., at 38—does not, by itself, reveal whether Congress intends the "overruling" statute to apply retroac-3 Even in the employment context, § 1981's coverage is broader than Title VII's, for Title VII applies only to employers with 15 or more employees, see 42 U. S. C. § 2000e(b), whereas § 1981 has no such limitation.
4 See Brief for Petitioners 35 ("Congress sought to restore what it and virtually all the lower courts thought had been the reach of § 1981 prior to Patterson").
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