This story got me thinking: do laws in the US always have to be couched in terms of “any individual (natural or fictitious) who meets certain criteria is subject to such and such” (thus opening the way for loopholes)? Or can a law come out and flatly state: “hey YOU. Yeah, YOU. C’mere. YOU’RE gonna do this or else!”
For example, “The top 50 banks by market capitalization as of Jan. 1, 2010 will pay the US government US$100mn dollars on April 15,” or even more explicitly, "The following banks will pay the US goverment US$100mn dollars: Citibank, Chase, JP Morgan . . . "
Would there be any difference if it were laws pertaining to tax, criminal or civil issues?
Technically Bills of Attainder only refer to legislatively enacted punishments. However, since virtually any law would at some point call for either some penalty for breaking the law, or require some financial burden to comply with it, laws naming specific people or institutions have generally been held in the US to be de facto bills of attainder.
What are called “private acts” can very well identify individuals. Prior to the erosion of sovereign immunity, the ony way to correct an injustice committed by the government as the government against an individual was to recompense him by an appropriation or other legislated ;gift’. Schedules of pensions including named individuals, restoration of land improperly taken for rights-of-way, etc., would name the persons to whom recompense was due in their texts. For ob vious reasons, these were not codified, but they do exist in older records.
It would certainly be possible to pass a law that said “any bank with capitalization in excess of X on Jan 1, 2010 will pay a tax of Y”. A law that taxed the largest 5 banks would be more problematic I’d think. For one thing, each bank would have to know the capitalization of all other banks to know if they were one.