Martin v. Hadix, 527 U.S. 343, 26 (1999)

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368

MARTIN v. HADIX

Opinion of Ginsburg, J.

law's substantive dimensions.1 Had Congress intended that § 803(d) apply retroactively, it might easily have specified, as the Court suggests, that all postenactment awards shall be subject to the limitation, see ante, at 354, or prescribed that the provision "shall apply in all proceedings pending on or commenced after the date of enactment of this Act." Congress instead left unaddressed § 803(d)'s temporal reach.

Comparison of § 803(d)'s text with that of a neighboring provision, § 802(b)(1) of the PLRA, is instructive for the retroactivity question we face. Section 802(b)(1), which governs "appropriate remedies" in prison litigation, applies expressly to "all prospective relief whether such relief was originally granted or approved before, on, or after the date of the enactment of this title." 110 Stat. 1321-70, note following 18 U. S. C. § 3626. "Congress [thus] saw fit to tell us which part of the Act was to be retroactively applied," i. e., § 802. Jensen v. Clarke, 94 F. 3d 1191, 1203 (CA8 1996). While I agree with the Court that the negative implication created by these two provisions is not dispositive, see ante, at 357, Congress' silence nevertheless suggests that § 803(d) has no carryback thrust.

Absent an express statutory command respecting retroactivity, Landgraf teaches, the attorney's fees provision should not be applied to pending cases if doing so would "have retroactive effect." 511 U. S., at 280. As the Court recognizes, see ante, at 360, application of § 803(d) to work performed before the PLRA's effective date would be impermissibly retroactive. Instead of the court-approved

1 Section 803(d) is thus unlike the unenacted provision discussed in Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U. S. 244, 260 (1994), which would have made the statute at issue in that case applicable " 'to all proceedings pending on or commenced after' " the effective date. Because this language would have linked the word "all" directly to the statute's temporal scope, we recognized that it might have qualified as a clear statement of retroactive effect. The word "any" is not similarly tied to the temporal scope of the PLRA, however, and so the inference suggested in the Landgraf discussion is not permissible here.

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