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Opinion of the Court
Court's express (albeit qualified) approval of applying such statutes to pending cases. Since Landgraf was the Court's latest word on the subject when the Act was passed, Congress could have taken the opinion's cautious statement about procedural statutes and its silence about the kind of provision exemplified by the new § 2254(d) as counseling the wisdom of being explicit if it wanted such a provision to be applied to cases already pending. While the terms of § 107(c) may not amount to the clear statement required for a mandate to apply a statute in the disfavored retroactive way,4 they do serve to make it clear as a general matter that
4 In United States v. Nordic Village, Inc., 503 U. S. 30, 34-37 (1992), this Court held that the existence of "plausible" alternative interpretations of statutory language meant that that language could not qualify as an "unambiguous" expression of a waiver of sovereign immunity. And cases where this Court has found truly "retroactive" effect adequately authorized by a statute have involved statutory language that was so clear that it could sustain only one interpretation. See Graham & Foster v. Good-cell, 282 U. S. 409, 416-420 (1931) (holding that a statutory provision "was manifestly intended to operate retroactively according to its terms" where the tax statute spelled out meticulously the circumstances that defined the claims to which it applied and where the alternative interpretation was absurd); Automobile Club of Mich. v. Commissioner, 353 U. S. 180, 184 (1957) (finding a clear statement authorizing the Commissioner of Internal Revenue to correct tax rulings and regulations "retroactively" where the statutory authorization for the Commissioner's action spoke explicitly in terms of "retroactivity"); United States v. Zacks, 375 U. S. 59, 65-67 (1963) (declining to give retroactive effect to a new substantive tax provision by reopening claims otherwise barred by statute of limitations and observing that Congress had provided for just this sort of retroactivity for other substantive provisions by explicitly creating new grace periods in which otherwise barred claims could be brought under the new substantive law). Cf. Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, 517 U. S. 44, 55-57 (1996) (finding a clear statement of congressional abrogation of Eleventh Amendment immunity where the federal statute went beyond granting federal jurisdiction to hear a claim and explicitly contemplated "the State" as defendant in federal court in numerous provisions of the Act).
Landgraf suggested that the following language from an unenacted precursor of the statute at issue in that case might possibly have qualified as a clear statement for retroactive effect: "[This Act] shall apply to all
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