AbstractThe Wigner distribution and many other members of the Cohen class of generalized phase-space distributions of a signal all share certain translation properties and the property that their two marginal distributions of energy density along the time and along the frequency axes equal the signal power and the spectral energy density. A natural generalization of this last property is shown to be a certain relationship through the Radon transform between the distribution and the signal's fractional Fourier transform. It is shown that the Wigner distribution is now distinguished by being the only member of the Cohen class that has this generalized property as well as a generalized translation property. The inversion theorem for the Wigner distribution is then extended to yield the fractional Fourier transforms.