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526

EASTERN ENTERPRISES v. APFEL

Opinion of O(cid:146)Connor, J.

pliﬁed the “customary congressional practice” of enacting
“retroactive statutes conﬁned to short and limited periods
required by the practicalities of producing national legisla-
tion.”

Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted).

This Court again considered the constitutionality of the
MPPAA in Connolly v. Pension Beneﬁt Guaranty Corpora-
tion, 475 U. S. 211 (1986), which presented the question
whether the MPPAA’s withdrawal
liability provisions ef-
fected an unconstitutional taking. The action was brought
by trustees of a multiemployer pension plan that, under col-
lective bargaining agreements, received contributions from
employers on the basis of the hours worked by their employ-
ees. We agreed that the liability imposed by the MPPAA
constituted a permanent deprivation of assets, but we re-
jected the notion that “such a statutory liability to a private
party always constitutes an uncompensated taking prohib-
“In the course
ited by the Fifth Amendment.”
of regulating commercial and other human affairs,” we ex-
plained, “Congress routinely creates burdens for some that
directly beneﬁt others.”
Id., at 223. Consistent with our
decisions in Gray and Turner Elkhorn, we reasoned that
legislation is not unlawful solely because it upsets otherwise
settled expectations.

Id., at 222.

Moreover, given our holding in Gray that the MPPAA did
not violate due process, we concluded that “it would be sur-
prising indeed to discover” that the statute effected a taking.
475 U. S., at 223. Although the employers in Connolly had
contractual agreements expressly limiting their contribu-
tions to the multiemployer plan, we observed that “[c]on-
tracts, however express, cannot fetter the constitutional au-
thority of Congress” and “the fact that legislation disregards
or destroys existing contractual rights does not always
transform the regulation into an illegal taking.”
Id., at 223–
224 (internal quotation marks omitted). Focusing on the
three factors of “particular signiﬁcance”—the economic im-
pact of the regulation, the extent to which the regulation