888
Opinion of Souter, J.
B
The answer to the Government's unmistakability argument also meets its two related contentions on the score of ultra vires: that the Bank Board and FSLIC had no authority to bargain away Congress's power to change the law in the future, and that we should in any event find no such authority conferred without an express delegation to that effect. The first of these positions rests on the reserved powers doctrine, developed in the course of litigating claims that States had violated the Contract Clause. See supra, at 874. It holds that a state government may not contract away "an essential attribute of its sovereignty," United States Trust, 431 U. S., at 23, with the classic example of its limitation on the scope of the Contract Clause being found in Stone v. Mississippi, 101 U. S. 814 (1880). There a corporation bargained for and received a state legislative charter to conduct lotteries, only to have them outlawed by statute a year later. This Court rejected the argument that the charter immunized the corporation from the operation of the statute, holding that "the legislature cannot bargain away the police power of a State." Id., at 817.33
The Government says that "[t]he logic of the doctrine . . . applies equally to contracts alleged to have been made by the federal government." Brief for United States 38. This
118 (1981) (arguing that "Holmes's celebrated dictum . . . goes too far, is too simple"). Finally, we have no need to consider the close relationship that Justice Scalia sees between the unmistakability and sovereign acts doctrines, see post, at 923-924, because, even considered separately, neither one favors the Government in this case.
33 See also Atlantic Coast Line R. Co. v. Goldsboro, 232 U. S. 548, 558 (1914) ("[T]he power of the State to establish all regulations that are reasonably necessary to secure the health, safety, good order, comfort, or general welfare of the community . . . can neither be abdicated nor bargained away, and is inalienable even by express grant"); West River Bridge Co. v. Dix, 6 How. 507 (1848) (State's contracts do not relinquish its eminent domain power).
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