Bill of attainder

A bill of attainder is a legislative act that harms the life or property of specifically identified persons or groups. It declares a specific person or group of persons (e.g., someone's children) to be guilty of a crime without a trial.^[1] It can be civil or criminal, and is most often a civil issue in the 21st century.

In the common law of England before the American Revolution, bills of attainder condemned specific persons to death. The Framers of the Constitution wanted to end that, and prohibited both the federal government (Article I, Section 9, Clause 3) and the states (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1) from passing bills of attainder under the doctrine of separation of powers.^[1] The Founders felt so strongly about this that bills of attainder and ex post facto laws are the only laws that the original Constitution prohibits both the federal government and states from ever passing.

Chief Justice John Marshall expanded the prohibition against bills of attainder beyond protection of life to protection of property also in Fletcher v. Peck (1810). However, the Supreme Court has not invalidated any bills of attainder since 1965. The Court will invalidate such law only if the legislation identifies the affected persons and punishes them without a judicial trial.

The Supreme Court viewed the ban on bills of attainder as essential to preserve the separation of powers. The judiciary protects its branch of government by ensuring that only a court can determine the guilt or innocence of an accused. In Cummings v. Missouri (1867), the Supreme Court held that the Congress may not "exercise the power and office of judge." In United States v. Brown (1965), the Court prohibited "legislative punishment, of any form or severity, of specifically designated persons or groups."

Stronger than Equal Protection

Challenges to laws under both the Equal Protection Clause and the bill of attainder are common, with more than 2,100 reported federal decisions as of Dec. 25, 2022 addressing both. (About 15% of that, or 308 additional decisions, are at the state level).

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BellSouth complains that this reading of the second factor reduces it to little more than a rational basis test, the most anemic form of constitutional scrutiny. If this were strictly true, of course, the Bill of Attainder Clause (as applied to non-suspect classes such as the BOCs) would do nothing more than duplicate the Equal Protection Clause. But the Supreme Court's attainder inquiry is in fact more exacting than a rational basis test, because it demands purposes that are not merely reasonable but nonpunitive. Punitive purposes, however rational, don't count.

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BellSouth Corp. v. FCC, 330 U.S. App. D.C. 109, 144 F.3d 58, 66-67 (1998).

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Much like equal-protection analysis, the inquiry begins with the Act's purpose. Notably, however, the bill-of-attainder standard is somewhat "more exacting" than equal protection's rational-basis scrutiny "because it demands purposes that are not merely reasonable but [also] nonpunitive." BellSouth Corp. v. FCC, 144 F.3d 58, 67, 330 U.S. App. D.C. 109 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (BellSouth I) ("Punitive purposes, however rational, don't count.").

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FOP, Metro. Police Dep't Labor Comm., D.C. Police Union v. District of Columbia, 502 F. Supp. 3d 45, 56 (D.D.C. 2020).

Congressional summary

In 2021, Congress summarized the limits imposed by the bill of attainder prohibition in the U.S. Constitution:^[2]

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Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution provides that Congress shall pass “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law.” AArticle I, Section 10, likewise prohibits the states from enacting bills of attainder. (Thus, there are two Bill of Attainder Clauses; this Sidebar uses the singular “Bill of Attainder Clause” to refer to the clause that binds Congress.) The Supreme Court has described a bill of attainder as “a law that legislatively determines guilt and inflicts punishment upon an identifiable individual without provision of the protections of a judicial trial.” Bills of attainder were common in England before the Founding, primarily targeting individuals accused of disloyalty to the government. Bills of attainder were also used in the American colonies. However, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution chose to depart from that historical practice. The Supreme Court has explained that the constitutional prohibitions on bills of attainder “reflect[] the Framers’ belief that the Legislative Branch is not so well suited as politically independent judges and juries to the task of ruling upon the blameworthiness of, and levying appropriate punishment upon, specific persons.”

Individuals who believe they are subject to a bill of attainder may challenge the relevant legislation in court. If a court finds that the legislation is a bill of attainder, it can declare the law unconstitutional. Judicial decisions invalidating laws as bills of attainder are relatively rare, but key cases dating back to the Reconstruction Era provide a framework for evaluating bill of attainder claims. The Supreme Court outlined the current test for bill of attainder claims in the 1977 case Nixon v. Administrator of General Services. In that case, the Court held that legislation constitutes a bill of attainder if it both (1) applies with specificity and (2) imposes punishment without trial. The following sections discuss each of those elements in turn.

Specificity

A law that singles out one or more individuals by name satisfies the specificity requirement. For instance, in United States v. Lovett, the Supreme Court struck down as a bill of attainder “an Act specifically cutting off the pay of certain named individuals [federal employees] found guilty of disloyalty.” Likewise, a provision of the legislation at issue in Nixon applied only to former President Richard M. Nixon. Known as the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, that statute directed the Administrator of General Services to take custody of Nixon’s presidential papers and tape recordings and promulgate regulations to govern the processing and preservation of those materials. The Supreme Court acknowledged “the Act’s specificity—the fact that it refer[red] to [Nixon] by name.”

Legislation that does not identify a targeted individual by name may satisfy the specificity requirement as well. In Foretich v. United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit considered a federal statute that responded to a high-profile child custody dispute by limiting the visitation rights of a father accused of sexually abusing his daughter. The D.C. Circuit ruled that the legislation applied with specificity because, “[a]lthough Congress stopped short of including the names” of the parents or child “in the text of the statute, the applicability of the Act depend[ed] on such a narrow set of circumstances that it applie[d] to no known cases other than” the custody dispute that prompted the legislation.

A law may also apply with specificity if it targets members of an identifiable group. For example, in the Reconstruction-era case Cummings v. Missouri, the Supreme Court struck down as a bill of attainder a provision of the Missouri state constitution that effectively barred former Confederate sympathizers from engaging in certain vocations. Likewise, in the 1965 case United States v. Brown, the Court held that a statute making it a crime for any member of the Communist Party to serve as an officer of a labor union was a bill of attainder.

Legislation that targets a specific corporation may also satisfy the specificity requirement. While the Supreme Court has not decided whether the Bill of Attainder Clause protects entities such as corporations, several lower federal courts have either held or assumed that it does.

Punishment

Specificity standing alone is never sufficient to support a finding that a law is a bill of attainder. The Nixon Court rejected the proposition that an individual or defined group is subject to a bill of attainder “whenever he or it is compelled to bear burdens which the individual or group dislikes.” Congress is not limited to “the choice of legislating for the universe, or legislating only benefits, or not legislating at all.” Instead, the Nixon Court explained, Congress may in some circumstances create “a legitimate class of one.” Thus, if a law applies with specificity but does not impose punishment, it will not be struck down as a bill of attainder.

The test for whether a law imposes punishment is complex and fact-based. In Nixon, the Supreme Court laid out three tests for assessing whether a law imposes punishment: (1) historical, (2) functional, and (3) motivational. Federal appeals courts have stated that none of the three tests is decisive, and not all three tests need to be satisfied for a law to be punitive.

The Historical Test

The first authority courts consult in considering whether a law imposes punishment is “[t]he infamous history of bills of attainder.” This historical test for punishment deems a statute to be punitive if it is one of a limited set of legislative actions that were found to be bills of attainder from before the Founding through the mid-20th century. At English common law, a bill of attainder was legislation imposing the death penalty without a judicial trial. That definition later expanded to include “bills of pains and penalties” that imposed other forms of criminal punishment such as banishment, imprisonment, or confiscation of property without trial. American courts further expanded the historical definition of punishment to include employment bans that prevent specific individuals or members of discrete classes from holding certain types of jobs. The vocational restrictions for Confederate sympathizers at issue in Cummings, the criminal prohibition of Communists serving as union officers in Brown, and the legislation that prevented named individuals accused of being “subversives” from drawing a federal salary in Lovett are all examples of employment bans that are considered “punishment” under the historical test.

However, courts have generally declined to extend historic jurisprudence related to employment bans to include restrictions on corporations. As an example, in Kaspersky Lab, Inc. v. Department of Homeland Security, Russia-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab brought a bill of attainder challenge to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 that barred the U.S. government from using any Kaspersky Lab products or services. The D.C. Circuit rejected the challenge, holding that none of the three tests for punishment was satisfied. With respect to the historical test, the court rejected the company’s argument that the ban on federal contracting with Kaspersky Lab was analogous to prior cases involving individual employment bans. The court explained that “although we assume that the Bill of Attainder Clause protects corporations as well as natural persons, we have no basis for likewise assuming that corporate entities feel burdens in the same way as living, breathing human beings.” In ACORN v. United States, the Second Circuit similarly held that withholding federal appropriations from a named company “does not constitute a traditional form of punishment,” noting, “There may well be actions that would be considered punitive if taken against an individual, but not if taken against a corporation.”

The Functional Test

The functional test is generally the most important of the three tests for punishment. This test considers “whether the law under challenge, viewed in terms of the type and severity of burdens imposed, reasonably can be said to further nonpunitive legislative purposes.” The functional test serves to prevent formalistic evasion of the Bill of Attainder Clause, recognizing that there may be measures that were not historically recognized as punishments that are nonetheless impermissibly punitive. But at the same time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has stated that even some laws imposing penalties that were historically considered punishments may not violate the Bill of Attainder Clause if the “legislation has a legitimately nonpunitive function, purpose, and structure.”

The functional test is fact-specific. It first considers whether the statute has a non-punitive purpose. Courts apply a level of scrutiny somewhat more stringent than the most deferential rational basis review, requiring what the D.C. Circuit has called “not some conceivable nonpunitive purpose, but rather an actual nonpunitive purpose.” If such a purpose exists and the challenged law reasonably serves that purpose, courts generally find that the law is not punitive. For instance, in Nixon, the Supreme Court held that the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act did not function as punishment because it served the nonpunitive purposes of retaining materials relevant to the prosecution of the Watergate breakin and preserving records with historical significance. In Kaspersky, the D.C. Circuit held that a statute prohibiting the U.S. government from using products or services from Kaspersky Lab served a nonpunitive interest in promoting “the security of the federal government’s information systems.” In SBC Communications, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, the Fifth Circuit held that a statute barring specific telecommunications companies from engaging in certain business activities served the nonpunitive purpose of “attempting to ensure fair competition in the [telecommunications] markets.”

If a nonpunitive purpose is evident, the court considers whether the challenged legislation is over- or underinclusive in view of its aims and whether less burdensome alternatives could have accomplished the same goals. “A grave imbalance or disproportion between the burden and the purported nonpunitive purpose suggests punitiveness, even where the statute bears some minimal relation to nonpunitive ends.” Thus, in Foretich, the D.C. Circuit held that a statute altering the visitation rights of a father accused of sexually abusing his child constituted a bill of attainder, in part because of the imbalance between the burden the statute imposed and the statute’s “implausible nonpunitive purposes.” And in Consolidated Edison Co. v. Pataki, the Second Circuit concluded that legislation barring a company from recovering certain costs from customers, on the stated basis that the company had “failed to exercise reasonable care” in its business, functioned as punishment because the court could “discern no wholly non-punitive purpose to justify” the law.

The Motivational Test

The third and final test for punishment considers whether the legislature that enacted a challenged law was motivated by an intent to punish the targeted person(s). Courts applying this test examine the bill’s text and legislative history to determine whether lawmakers expressed punitive intent.

The motivational test is not usually dispositive. The Nixon Court opined that a law may qualify as a bill of attainder even without a “formal legislative announcement of moral blameworthiness or punishment.” Moreover, if the historical and functional tests are not satisfied, the motivational test standing alone does not compel a finding that a law is punitive unless the reviewing court finds “unmistakable evidence of punitive intent.” However, a significant amount of punitive language in congressional documents or legislative debate may support a finding that a law imposes punishment. For instance, committee reports on the legislation at issue in Lovett characterized the affected individuals as “guilty of having engaged in ‘subversive activity’” and “unfit” for government service. In Foretich, the D.C. Circuit cited statements of multiple legislators characterizing the child at the center of the custody dispute as a “victim” and the legislation as “deal[ing] with the inadequacies of the court system” and “bringing justice” to her family.

By contrast, isolated statements by a few lawmakers generally do not suffice to show a legislative intent to punish. In Kaspersky, the D.C. Circuit considered one Senator’s statements that the “case against Kaspersky Lab [wa]s overwhelming” and that “strong ties between Kaspersky Lab and the Kremlin [we]re alarming and well-documented.” The court concluded that “even if [the Senator’s] statements did reveal a personal desire to punish Kaspersky, the company cite[d] no corroborating evidence indicating that other members of Congress shared her supposedly punitive motivations.” In ACORN, an organization that had been excluded from receiving federal funding cited statements of “nearly ten members of the House of Representatives” labeling the organization as corrupt and accusing it of specific offenses. The Second Circuit concluded, “Despite the evidence of punitive intent on the part of some members of Congress, unlike in Lovett, there is no congressional finding of guilt in this case.” The court thus held that the statements were “insufficient to establish—by themselves—the clearest proof of punitive intent necessary for a bill of attainder.”

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