Cite as: 530 U. S. 327 (2000)
Opinion of Souter, J.
also raise a serious separation-of-powers issue if the time it allows turns out to be inadequate for a court to determine whether the new prerequisite to relief is satisfied in a particular case.1 I thus do not join Part III of the Court's opinion and on remand would require proceedings consistent with this one. I respectfully dissent from the terms of the Court's disposition.
A prospective remedial order may rest on at least three different legal premises: the underlying right meant to be secured; the rules of procedure for obtaining relief, defining requisites of pleading, notice, and so on; and, in some cases, rules lying between the other two, such as those defining a required level of certainty before some remedy may be ordered, or the permissible scope of relief. At issue here are rules of the last variety.2
Congress has the authority to change rules of this sort by imposing new conditions precedent for the continuing enforcement of existing, prospective remedial orders and requiring courts to apply the new rules to those orders. Cf. Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 514 U. S. 211, 232 (1995). If its legislation gives courts adequate time to determine the applicability of a new rule to an old order and to take the action necessary to apply it or to vacate the order, there seems little basis for claiming that Congress has crossed
1 The Court forecloses the possibility of a separation-of-powers challenge based on insufficient time under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA): "In this action, we have no occasion to decide whether there could be a time constraint on judicial action that was so severe that it implicated these structural separation of powers concerns. The PLRA does not deprive courts of their adjudicatory role, but merely provides a new legal standard for relief and encourages courts to apply that standard promptly." Ante, at 350.
2 Other provisions of the PLRA narrow the scope of the underlying entitlements that an order can protect, but some orders may have been issued to secure constitutional rights unaffected by the PLRA. In any event, my concern here is solely with the PLRA's changes to the requisites for relief.
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