Cite as: 514 U. S. 211 (1995)
Stevens, J., dissenting
Even if the rule the Court announces today were sound, it would not control the case before us. In order to obtain the benefit of § 27A, petitioners had to file a timely motion and persuade the District Court they had timely filed their complaint under pre-Lampf law. In the judgment of the District Court, petitioners satisfied those conditions. Congress reasonably could have assumed, indeed must have expected, that some movants under § 27A(b) would fail to do so. The presence of an important condition that the District Court must find a movant to have satisfied before it may reopen a judgment distinguishes § 27A from the unconditional congressional directives the Court appears to forbid.
Moreover, unlike the colonial legislative commands on which the Court bases its holding, § 27A directed action not in "a civil case," ante, at 223 (discussing Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386 (1798)), but in a large category of civil cases.17 The
Court declares that a legislative direction to reopen a class of 40 cases is 40 times as bad as a direction to reopen a single final judgment because "power is the object of the separation-of-powers prohibition." See ante, at 228. This self-evident observation might be salient if § 27A(b) unconditionally commanded courts to reopen judgments even absent findings that the complaints were timely under pre-Lampf law. But Congress did not decide—and could not know how any court would decide—the timeliness issue in any particu-could not constitutionally save a death row inmate from execution if his conviction had become final before the statute was passed.
17 At the time Congress was considering the bill that became § 27A, a House Subcommittee reported that Lampf had resulted in the dismissal of 15 cases, involving thousands of plaintiffs in every State (of whom over 32,000 had been identified) and claims totaling over $692.25 million. In addition, motions to dismiss based on Lampf were then pending in 17 cases involving thousands of plaintiffs in every State and claims totaling over $4.578 billion. Hearing on H. R. 3185, before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 102d Cong., 1st Sess., 1-4 (1991).
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