Cite as: 514 U. S. 211 (1995)
Stevens, J., dissenting
tions. The Court, however, failed to adopt the transition rules that ordinarily attend alterations shortening the time to sue. Congress, in § 27A, has supplied those rules. The statute reflects the ability of two coequal branches to cooperate in providing for the impartial application of legal rules to particular disputes. The Court's mistrust of such cooperation ill serves the separation of powers.21
IV
The Court has drawn the wrong lesson from the Framers' disapproval of colonial legislatures' appellate review of judicial decisions. The Framers rejected that practice, not out of a mechanistic solicitude for "final judgments," but because they believed the impartial application of rules of law, rather
21 Although I agree with Justice Breyer's general approach to the separation-of-powers issue, I believe he gives insufficient weight to two important features of § 27A. First, he fails to recognize that the statute restored a pre-existing rule of law in order to remedy the manifest injustice produced by the Court's retroactive application of Lampf. The only " 'substantial deprivation' " Congress imposed on defendants was that properly filed lawsuits proceed to decisions on the merits. Cf. ante, at 242 (Breyer, J., concurring in judgment) (quoting INS v. Chadha, 462 U. S. 919, 962 (1983) (Powell, J., concurring in judgment)). Second, he understates the class of defendants burdened by § 27A: He finds the statute underinclusive because it provided no remedy for potential plaintiffs who may have failed to file timely actions in reliance on pre-Lampf limitations law, but he denies the importance of § 27A(a), which provided a remedy for plaintiffs who appealed dismissals after Lampf. See ante, at 243-244 (Breyer, J., concurring in judgment). The coverage of § 27A is coextensive with the retroactive application of the general rule announced in Lampf. If Congress had enacted a statute providing that the Lampf rule should apply to all cases filed after the statute's effective date and that the pre-Lampf rule should apply to all cases filed before that date, Justice Breyer could not reasonably condemn the statute as special legislation. The only difference between such a statute and § 27A is that § 27A covered all cases pending on the date of Lampf—June 20, 1991— rather than on the effective date of the statute—December 19, 1991. In my opinion, § 27A has sufficient generality to avoid the characteristics of a bill of attainder.
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