898
Opinion of Souter, J.
rules which govern society' " (citation omitted)).43 Hence, governmental action will not be held against the Government for purposes of the impossibility defense so long as the action's impact upon public contracts is, as in Horowitz, merely incidental to the accomplishment of a broader governmental objective. See O'Neill v. United States, 231 Ct. Cl. 823, 826 (1982) (noting that the sovereign acts doctrine recognizes that "the Government's actions, otherwise legal, will occasionally incidentally impair the performance of contracts").44 The greater the Government's self-interest, however, the more suspect becomes the claim that its private contracting partners ought to bear the financial burden of the Government's own improvidence, and where a substantial part of the impact of the Government's action rendering performance impossible falls on its own contractual obligations, the defense will be unavailable. Cf. Sun Oil Co. v. United States, 215 Ct. Cl. 716, 768, 572 F. 2d 786, 817 (1978) (rejecting sovereign acts defense where the Secretary of the Interior's actions were " 'directed principally and primarily at plaintiffs' contractual right' ").45
43 The dissent accuses us of transplanting this due process principle into alien soil, see post, at 931-932. But this Court did not even wait until the Term following Hurtado before applying its principle of generality to a case that, like this one, involved the deprivation of property rights. See Hagar v. Reclamation Dist. No. 108, 111 U. S. 701, 708 (1884). More importantly, it would be surprising indeed if the sovereign acts doctrine, resting on the inherent nature of sovereignty, were not shaped by fundamental principles about how sovereigns ought to behave.
44 See also Speidel, 51 Geo. L. J., at 539-540 (observing that "the commonly expressed conditions to the availability of the sovereign acts defense" are not only that "the act . . . must have been 'public and general,' " but also that "the damage to the contractor must have been caused indirectly"); cf. Exxon Corp. v. Eagerton, 462 U. S. 176, 191-192 (1983) (distinguishing between direct and incidental impairments under the Contract Clause).
45 Cf. also Resolution Trust Corporation v. Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, 25 F. 3d 1493, 1501 (CA10 1994) ("The limits of this immunity [for sovereign acts] are defined by the extent to which the
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