896
Opinion of Souter, J.
attributable to the Government as contractor so as to bar the Government's right to discharge. The sovereign acts doctrine thus balances the Government's need for freedom to legislate with its obligation to honor its contracts by asking whether the sovereign act is properly attributable to the Government as contractor. If the answer is no, the Government's defense to liability depends on the answer to the further question, whether that act would otherwise release the Government from liability under ordinary principles of contract law.40 Neither question can be answered in the Government's favor here.
A
If the Government is to be treated like other contractors, some line has to be drawn in situations like the one before us between regulatory legislation that is relatively free of Government self-interest and therefore cognizable for the purpose of a legal impossibility defense and, on the other hand, statutes tainted by a governmental object of self-relief. Such an object is not necessarily inconsistent with a public purpose, of course, and when we speak of governmental "self-interest," we simply mean to identify instances in which the Government seeks to shift the costs of meeting its legitimate public responsibilities to private parties. Cf. Armstrong v. United States, 364 U. S., at 49 (The Government may not "forc[e] some people alone to bear public burdens
40 See Jones v. United States, 1 Ct. Cl. 383, 385 (1865) ("Wherever the public and private acts of the government seem to commingle, a citizen or corporate body must by supposition be substituted in its place, and then the question be determined whether the action will lie against the supposed defendant"); O'Neill v. United States, 231 Ct. Cl. 823, 826 (1982) (sovereign acts doctrine applies where, "[w]ere [the] contracts exclusively between private parties, the party hurt by such governing action could not claim compensation from the other party for the governing action"). The dissent ignores these statements (including the statement from Jones, from which case Horowitz drew its reasoning literally verbatim), when it says, post, at 931, that the sovereign acts cases do not emphasize the need to treat the government-as-contractor the same as a private party.
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