Cite as: 518 U. S. 839 (1996)
Opinion of Souter, J.
Bar Found. Research J. 379, 392-393 (observing that the English rationale for precluding a legislature from binding its successors does not apply in America). Hence, although we have recognized that "a general law . . . may be repealed, amended or disregarded by the legislature which enacted it," and "is not binding upon any subsequent legislature," Manigault v. Springs, 199 U. S. 473, 487 (1905),19 on this side of the Atlantic the principle has always lived in some tension with the constitutionally created potential for a legislature, under certain circumstances, to place effective limits on its successors, or to authorize executive action resulting in such a limitation.
The development of this latter, American doctrine in federal litigation began in cases applying limits on state sovereignty imposed by the National Constitution. Thus Chief Justice Marshall's exposition in Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cranch 87 (1810), where the Court held that the Contract Clause, U. S. Const., Art. I, § 10, cl. 1, barred the State of Georgia's effort to rescind land grants made by a prior state legislature. Marshall acknowledged "that one legislature is competent to repeal any act which a former legislature was competent to pass; and that one legislature cannot abridge the powers of a succeeding legislature." 6 Cranch, at 135. "The correctness of this principle, so far as respects general legislation," he said, "can never be controverted." Ibid. Marshall went on to qualify the principle, however, noting that "if an act be done under a law, a succeeding legislature cannot undo it. The past cannot be recalled by the most absolute power." Ibid. For Marshall, this was true for the two distinct reasons that the intrusion on vested rights by the Georgia Legislature's Act of repeal might well have gone beyond the limits of "the
19 See also Reichelderfer v. Quinn, 287 U. S. 315, 318 (1932) ("[T]he will of a particular Congress . . . does not impose itself upon those to follow in succeeding years"); Black, Amending the Constitution: A Letter to a Congressman, 82 Yale L. J. 189, 191 (1972) (characterizing this "most familiar and fundamental principl[e]" as "so obvious as rarely to be stated").
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