882
Opinion of Souter, J.
contracting party the amount by which its costs are increased by the Government's sovereign act"), cert. denied, 389 U. S. 846 (1967).25 Even if respondents were asking that the Government be required to make up any capital deficiency arising from the exclusion of goodwill and capital credits from the relevant calculations, such relief would hardly amount to an exemption from the capital requirements of FIRREA; after all, Glendale (the only respondent thrift still in operation) would still be required to maintain adequate tangible capital reserves under FIRREA, and the purpose of the statute, the protection of the insurance fund, would be served. Nor would such a damages award deprive the Government of money it would otherwise be entitled to receive (as a tax rebate would), since the capital require-25 See also Hughes Communications Galaxy, Inc. v. United States, 998 F. 2d, at 958 (finding the unmistakability doctrine inapplicable to "the question of how liability for certain contingencies was allocated by the contract"); Sunswick Corp. v. United States, 109 Ct. Cl. 772, 798, 75 F. Supp. 221, 228 ("We know of no reason why the Government may not by the terms of its contract bind itself for the consequences of some act on its behalf which, but for the contract, would be nonactionable as an act of the sovereign. As shown in United States v. Bostwick, 94 U. S. 53, 69 [(1877)], the liability of the Government in such circumstances rests upon the contract and not upon the act of the Government in its sovereign capacity"), cert. denied, 334 U. S. 827 (1948); see generally Eule, Temporal Limits on the Legislative Mandate: Entrenchment and Retroactivity, 1987 Am. Bar Found. Research J. 379, 424 (observing that limiting the Government's obligation to "compensating for the financial losses its repudiations engender . . . affords the current legislature the freedom to respond to constituents' needs, while at the same time protecting those whose contractual interests are impaired"); Note, A Procedural Approach to the Contract Clause, 93 Yale L. J. 918, 928-929 (1984) ("A damage remedy is superior to an injunction because damages provide the states with the flexibility to impair contracts retroactively when the benefits exceed the costs. So long as the victims of contract impairments are made whole through compensation, there is little reason to grant those victims an injunctive remedy").
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