Cite as: 527 U. S. 343 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
(a lower pay rate) to conduct completed before enactment. The preenactment conduct that respondents contend is affected is the attorney's initial decision to file suit on behalf of the prisoner clients. Brief for Respondents 29-31. Even assuming, arguendo, that when the attorneys filed these cases in 1977 and 1980, they had a reasonable expectation that they would be compensated for postjudgment monitoring based on a particular fee schedule (i. e., the pre-PLRA, "prevailing market rate" schedule), respondents' argument that the PLRA affects pre-PLRA conduct fails because it is based on the assumption that the attorney's initial decision to file a case on behalf of a client is an irrevocable one. In other words, respondents' argument assumes that once an attorney files suit, she must continue working on that case until the decree is terminated. Respondents provide no support for this assumption, however. They allude to ethical constraints on an attorney's ability to withdraw from a case midstream, see Brief for Respondents 29 ("And finally, it is at that time that plaintiffs' counsel commit themselves ethically to continued representation of their clients to ensure that the Constitution is honored, a course of conduct that cannot lightly be altered"), but they do not seriously contend that the attorneys here were prohibited from withdrawing from the case during the postjudgment monitoring stage, see, e. g., Tr. of Oral Arg. 42-43. It cannot be said that the PLRA changes the legal consequences of the attorneys' pre-PLRA decision to file the case.
C
In sum, we conclude that the PLRA contains no express command about its temporal scope. Because we find that the PLRA, if applied to postjudgment monitoring services performed before the effective date of the Act, would have a retroactive effect inconsistent with our assumption that statutes are prospective, in the absence of an express command by Congress to apply the Act retroactively, we de-
361
Page: Index Previous 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007