...In his Commentaries, Blackstone stated the centuries-old concept that one legislature may not bind the legislative authority of its successors:
"Acts of parliament derogatory from the power of subsequent parliaments bind not. . . . Because the legislature, being in truth the sovereign power, is always of equal, always of absolute authority: it acknowledges no superior upon earth, which the prior legislature must have been, if it's [sic] ordinances could bind the present parliament." 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 90 (1765).
In England, of course, Parliament was historically supreme in the sense that no "higher law" limited the scope of legislative action or provided mechanisms for placing legally enforceable limits upon it in specific instances; the power of American legislative bodies, by contrast, is subject to the overriding dictates of the Constitution and the obligations that it authorizes. See Eule, Temporal Limits on the Legislative Mandate: Entrenchment and Retroactivity, 1987 Am. Bar Found. Research J. 379, 392-393 (observing that the English rationale for precluding a legislature from binding its successors does not apply in America). Hence, although we have recognized that "a general law . . . may be repealed, amended or disregarded by the legislature which enacted it," and "is not binding upon any subsequent legislature," Manigault v. Springs, 199 U. S. 473, 487 (1905), 19 on this side of the Atlantic the principle has always lived in some tension with the constitutionally created potential for a legislature, under certain circumstances, to place effective limits on its successors, or to authorize executive action resulting in such a limitation.
The development of this latter, American doctrine in federal litigation began in cases applying limits on state sovereignty imposed by the National Constitution. Thus Chief Justice Marshall's exposition in Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cranch 87 (1810), where the Court held that the Contract Clause, U. S. Const., Art. I, Section(s) 10, cl. 1, barred the State of Georgia's effort to rescind land grants made by a prior state legislature. Marshall acknowledged "that one legislature is competent to repeal any act which a former legislature was competent to pass; and that one legislature cannot abridge the powers of a succeeding legislature." Id., at 135. "The correctness of this principle, so far as respects general legislation," he said, "can never be controverted."...
