his working time on partisan political matters. Records arising from his political activities, like his private and personal records, are not segregated from the great mass of materials. He argues that the Act's archival screening process therefore necessarily entails invasion of his constitutionally protected rights of associational privacy and political speech. As summarized by the District Court: "It is alleged that the Act invades the private formulation of political thought critical to free speech and association, imposing sanctions upon past expressive activity, and more significantly, limiting that of the future because individuals who learn the substance of certain private communications by [appellant]-especially those critical of themselves-will refuse to associate with him. The Act is furthermore said to chill [his] expression because he will be 'saddled' with prior positions communicated in private, leaving him unable to take inconsistent positions in the future." 408 F. Supp., at 367–368.

The District Court, viewing these arguments as in essence a claim that disclosure of the materials violated appellant's associational privacy, and therefore as not significantly different in structure from appellant's privacy claim, again treated the arguments as limited to the constitutionality of the Act's screening process. Id., at 368. As was true with respect to the more general privacy challenge, only a fraction of the materials can be said to raise a First Amendment claim. Nevertheless, the District Court acknowledged that appellant would "appear. . . to have a legitimate expectation that he would have an opportunity to remove some of the sensitive political documents before any government screening took place." Ibid. The District Court concluded, however, that there was no reason to believe that the mandated regulations when promulgated would not adequately protect against public access to materials implicating appellant's privacy in political association, and that "any burden arising solely from review by professional and discreet archivists is not significant."

...

The court therefore held that the Act does not signifi

cantly interfere with or chill appellant's First Amendment rights. Id., at 369. We agree with the District Court's conclusion.

It is, of course, true that involvement in partisan politics is closely protected by the First Amendment, Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (1976), and that "compelled disclosure, in itself, can seriously infringe on privacy of association and belief guaranteed by the First Amendment." Id., at 64. But a compelling public need that cannot be met in a less restrictive way will override those interests, Kusper v. Pontikes, 414 U. S. 51, 58-59 (1973); United States v. O'Brien, 391 U. S. 367, 376-377 (1968); Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U. S. 479, 488 (1960), "particularly when the 'free functioning of our national institutions' is involved." Buckley v. Valeo, supra, at 66. Since no less restrictive way than archival screening has been suggested as a means for identification of materials to be returned to appellant, the burden of that screening is presently the measure of his First Amendment claim. Id., at 84. The extent of any such burden, however, is speculative in light of the Act's terms protecting appellant from improper public disclosures and guaranteeing him full judicial review before any public access is permitted. §§ 104 (a)(5), 104 (a) (7), 105 (a).29 As the District Court concluded, the First Amendment

29 Appellant argues that Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, 394 U. S. 147, 150-151 (1969); Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536 (1965); Staub v. Baxley, 355 U. S. 313, 319-321 (1958); Thomas v. Collins, 323 U. S. 516, 538541 (1945); and Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U. S. 444, 452-453 (1938), support his contention that "[a] statute which vests such broad authority [with respect to First Amendment rights] is unconstitutional on its face, and the party subjected to it may treat it as a nullity even if its actual implementation would not harm him." Brief for Appellant 169. The argument is without merit. Those cases involved regulations that permitted public officials in their arbitrary discretion to impose prior restraints on expressional or associational activities. In contrast, the Act is concerned only with materials that record past activities and with a screening process guided by longstanding archival screening standards.

claim is clearly outweighed by the important governmental interests promoted by the Act.

For the same reasons, we find no merit in appellant's argument that the Act's scheme for custody and archival screening of the materials "necessarily inhibits [the] freedom of political activity [of future Presidents] and thereby reduces the 'quantity and diversity' of the political speech and association that the Nation will be receiving from its leaders." Brief for Appellant 168. It is significant, moreover, that this concern has not deterred President Ford from signing the Act into law, or President Carter from urging this Court's affirmance of the judgment of the District Court.

VII

Bill of Attainder Clause
A

Finally, we address appellant's argument that the Act constitutes a 'bill of attainder proscribed by Art. I, §9, of the Constitution.30 His argument is that Congress acted on the premise that he had engaged in "misconduct,' was an "'unreliable custodian'" of his own documents, and generally was deserving of a "legislative judgment of blame worthiness," Brief for Appellant 132-133. Thus, he argues, the Act is pervaded with the key features of a bill of attainder: a law that legislatively determines guilt and inflicts punishment upon an identifiable individual without provision of the protections of a judicial trial. See United States v. Brown, 381

30 Article I, §9, applicable to Congress, provides that "[n]o Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed," and Art. I, § 10, applicable to the States, provides that "[n]o State shall . . . pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law .... The linking of bills of attainder and ex post facto laws is explained by the fact that a legislative denunciation and condemnation of an individual often acted to impose retroactive punishment. See Z. Chafee, Jr., Three Human Rights in the Constitution of 1787, pp. 92-93 (1956).

425

NIXON v. ADMINISTRATOR OF GENERAL SERVICES 469

Opinion of the Court

U. S. 437, 445, 447 (1965); United States v. Lovett, 328 U. S. 303, 315-316 (1946); Ex parte Garland, 4 Wall. 333, 377 (1867); Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 323 (1867).

Appellant's argument relies almost entirely upon United States v. Brown, supra, the Court's most recent decision addressing the scope of the Bill of Attainder Clause. It is instructive, therefore, to sketch the broad outline of that case. Brown invalidated § 504 of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, 29 U. S. C. § 504, that made it a crime for a Communist Party member to serve as an officer of a labor union. After detailing the infamous history of bills of attainder, the Court found that the Bill of Attainder Clause was an important ingredient of the doctrine of "separation of powers," one of the organizing principles of our system of government. 381 U. S., at 442-443. Just as Art. III confines the Judiciary to the task of adjudicating concrete "cases or controversies," so too the Bill of Attainder Clause was found to "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." 381 U. S., at 445. Brown thus held that § 504 worked a bill of attainder by focusing upon easily identifiable members of a class-members of the Communist Party-and imposing on them the sanction of mandatory forfeiture of a job or office, long deemed to be punishment within the contemplation of the Bill of Attainder Clause. See, e. g., United States v. Lovett, supra, at 316; Cummings v. Missouri, supra, at 320.

Brown, Lovett, and earlier cases unquestionably gave broad and generous meaning to the constitutional protection against bills of attainder. But appellant's proposed reading is far broader still. In essence, he argues that Brown establishes that the Constitution is offended whenever a law imposes undesired consequences on an individual or on a class

that is not defined at a proper level of generality. The Act in question therefore is faulted for singling out appellant, as opposed to all other Presidents or members of the Government, for disfavored treatment.

Appellant's characterization of the meaning of a bill of attainder obviously proves far too much. By arguing that an individual or defined group is attainted whenever he or it is compelled to bear burdens which the individual or group dislikes, appellant removes the anchor that ties the bill of attainder guarantee to realistic conceptions of classification and punishment. His view would cripple the very process of legislating, for any individual or group that is made the subject of adverse legislation can complain that the lawmakers could and should have defined the relevant affected class at a greater level of generality." Furthermore, every person or group made subject to legislation which he or it finds burdensome may subjectively feel, and can complain, that he or it is being subjected to unwarranted punishment. United States v. Lovett, supra, at 324 (Frankfurter, J., concurring).32

31 In this case, for example, appellant faults the Act for taking custody of his papers but not those of other Presidents. Brief for Appellant 130. But even a congressional definition of the class consisting of all Presidents would have been vulnerable to the claim of being overly specific, since the definition might more generally include all members of the Executive Branch, or all members of the Government, or all in possession of Presidential papers, or all in possession of Government papers. This does not dispose of appellant's contention that the Act focuses upon him with the requisite degree of specificity for a bill of attainder, see infra, at 471-472, but it demonstrates that simple reference to the breadth of the Act's focus cannot be determinative of the reach of the Bill of Attainder Clause as a limitation upon legislative action that disadvantages a person or group. See, e. g., United States v. Brown, 381 U. S. 437, 474–475 (1965) (WHITE, J., dissenting); n. 34, infra.

32 "The fact that harm is inflicted by governmental authority does not make it punishment. Figuratively speaking all discomforting action may be deemed punishment because it deprives of what otherwise would be enjoyed. But there may be reasons other than punitive for such deprivation."