ALDEN et al. v.
Justice
Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court.
In 1992, petitioners, a group of probation officers, filed suit against their
employer, the State of
The
We hold that the powers delegated to Congress under Article I of the United
States Constitution do not include the power to subject nonconsenting
States to private suits for damages in state courts. We decide as well that the
State of
I
The Eleventh Amendment makes explicit reference to the States' immunity from
suits "commenced or prosecuted against one of the
The generation that designed and adopted our federal system considered immunity
from private suits central to sovereign dignity. When the Constitution was
ratified, it was well established in English law that the Crown could not be
sued without consent in its own courts. Although the American people had
rejected other aspects of English political theory, the doctrine that a
sovereign could not be sued without its consent was universal in the States
when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. The ratification debates,
furthermore, underscored the importance of the States' sovereign immunity to
the American people. Grave concerns were raised by the provisions of Article
III which extended the federal judicial power to controversies between States
and citizens of other States or foreign nations....
Despite the persuasive assurances of the Constitution's leading advocates and
the expressed understanding of the only state conventions to address the issue
in explicit terms, this Court held, just five years after the Constitution was
adopted, that Article III authorized a private citizen of another State to sue
the State of
The States, in particular, responded with outrage to the decision. The
Massachusetts Legislature, for example, denounced the decision as
"repugnant to the first principles of a federal government," and
called upon the State's Senators and Representatives to take all necessary
steps to "remove any clause or article of the Constitution, which can be
construed to imply or justify a decision, that, a State is compellable to
answer in any suit by an individual or individuals in any Court of the United
States."
The text and history of the Eleventh Amendment also suggest that Congress acted
not to change but to restore the original constitutional design.... The text
reflects the historical context and the congressional objective in endorsing
the Amendment for ratification. Congress chose not to enact language codifying
the traditional understanding of sovereign immunity but rather to address the
specific provisions of the Constitution that had raised concerns during the
ratification debates and formed the basis of the Chisholm decision.
Given the outraged reaction to Chisholm , as
well as Congress' repeated refusal to otherwise qualify the text of the
Amendment, it is doubtful that if Congress meant to write a new immunity into
the Constitution it would have limited that immunity to the narrow text of the
Eleventh Amendment....
The more natural inference is that the Constitution was understood, in light of
its history and structure, to preserve the States' traditional immunity from
private suits. As the Amendment clarified the only provisions of the
Constitution that anyone had suggested might support a contrary understanding,
there was no reason to draft with a broader brush.... Not only do the ratification debates and the
events leading to the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment reveal the original
understanding of the States' constitutional immunity from suit, they also
underscore the importance of sovereign immunity to the founding generation.
Simply put, "The Constitution never would have been ratified if the States
and their courts were to be stripped of their sovereign authority except as
expressly provided by the Constitution itself.".
II
In this case we must determine whether Congress has the power, under Article I,
to subject nonconsenting States to private suits in
their own courts. As the foregoing discussion makes clear, the fact that the
Eleventh Amendment by its terms limits only "[t]he Judicial power of the
United States" does not resolve the question. To rest on the words of the
Amendment alone would be to engage in the type of ahistorical
literalism we have rejected in interpreting the scope of the States' sovereign
immunity since the discredited decision in Chisholm .
While the constitutional principle of sovereign immunity does pose a bar to
federal jurisdiction over suits against nonconsenting
States, this is not the only structural basis of sovereign immunity implicit in
the constitutional design. Rather, "[t]here is also the postulate that
States of the Union, still possessing attributes of sovereignty, shall be
immune from suits, without their consent, save where there has been `a
surrender of this immunity in the plan of the convention.' "
Article I, §8 grants Congress broad power to enact legislation in several
enumerated areas of national concern. The Supremacy Clause, furthermore,
provides: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the
We look first to evidence of the original understanding of the Constitution.
Petitioners contend that because the ratification debates and the events
surrounding the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment focused on the States'
immunity from suit in federal courts, the historical record gives no
instruction as to the founding generation's intent to preserve the States'
immunity from suit in their own courts.
The language of the Eleventh Amendment was directed toward the only provisions
of the constitutional text believed to call the States' immunity from private
suits into question. Although Article III expressly contemplated jurisdiction
over suits between States and individuals, nothing in the Article or in any
other part of the Constitution suggested the States could not assert immunity
from private suit in their own courts or that Congress had the power to
abrogate sovereign immunity there.
In light of the language of the Constitution and the historical context, it is
quite apparent why neither the ratification debates nor the language of the
Eleventh Amendment addressed the States' immunity from suit in their own courts.
The concerns voiced at the ratifying conventions, the furor raised by Chisholm,
and the speed and unanimity with which the
Amendment was adopted, moreover, underscore the jealous care with which the
founding generation sought to preserve the sovereign immunity of the States. To
read this history as permitting the inference that the Constitution stripped
the States of immunity in their own courts and allowed Congress to subject them
to suit there would turn on its head the concern of the founding generation--that
Article III might be used to circumvent state-court immunity. In light of the
historical record it is difficult to conceive that the Constitution would have
been adopted if it had been understood to strip the States of immunity from
suit in their own courts and cede to the Federal Government a power to subject nonconsenting States to private suits in these fora.
We have also relied on the States' immunity in their own courts as a premise in
our Eleventh Amendment rulings. In particular, the exception to our sovereign
immunity doctrine recognized in Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123 (1908), is
based in part on the premise that sovereign immunity bars relief against States
and their officers in both state and federal courts, and that certain suits for
declaratory or injunctive relief against state officers must therefore be
permitted if the Constitution is to remain the supreme law of the land....
If a
suit against state officers is precluded in the national courts by the Eleventh
Amendment to the Constitution, and may be forbidden by a State to its courts,
as it is contended in the case at bar that it may be, without power of review
by this court, it must be evident that an easy way is open to prevent the
enforcement of many provisions of the Constitution ... .Had we not understood
the States to retain a constitutional immunity from suit in their own courts,
the need for the Ex parte Young rule would have been less pressing, and
the rule would not have formed so essential a part of our sovereign immunity
doctrine.
III
The constitutional privilege of a State to assert its sovereign immunity in its
own courts does not confer upon the State a concomitant right to disregard the
Constitution or valid federal law. The States and their officers are bound by
obligations imposed by the Constitution and by federal statutes that comport
with the constitutional design. We are unwilling to assume the States will
refuse to honor the Constitution or obey the binding laws of the
Sovereign immunity, moreover, does not bar all judicial review of state
compliance with the Constitution and valid federal law. Rather, certain limits
are implicit in the constitutional principle of state sovereign immunity. The
first of these limits is that sovereign immunity bars suits only in the absence
of consent. Many States, on their own initiative, have enacted statutes consenting
to a wide variety of suits. We have held also that in adopting the Fourteenth
Amendment, the people required the States to surrender a portion of the
sovereignty that had been preserved to them by the original Constitution, so
that Congress may authorize private suits against nonconsenting
States pursuant to its §5 enforcement power.
The second important limit to the principle of sovereign immunity is that it
bars suits against States but not lesser entities. The immunity does not extend
to suits prosecuted against a municipal corporation or other governmental
entity which is not an arm of the State. Nor does sovereign
immunity bar all suits against state officers. Some suits against state
officers are barred by the rule that sovereign immunity is not limited to suits
which name the State as a party if the suits are, in fact, against the
State. The rule, however, does not bar certain actions against state
officers for injunctive or declaratory relief. Compare Ex parte Young and
Edelman v.
The principle of sovereign immunity as reflected in our jurisprudence strikes
the proper balance between the supremacy of federal law and the separate
sovereignty of the States. That we have, during the first 210 years of our
constitutional history, found it unnecessary to decide the question presented
here suggests a federal power to subject nonconsenting
States to private suits in their own courts is unnecessary to uphold the
Constitution and valid federal statutes as the supreme law....
Justice
Souter , with whom Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice
Breyer join, dissenting.
The American Colonies did not enjoy sovereign immunity, that being a privilege
understood in English law to be reserved for the Crown alone; "antecedent
to the Declaration of Independence, none of the colonies were, or pretended to
be, sovereign states" . Several colonial
charters, including those of
From a canvass of this spectrum of opinion expressed at the ratifying
conventions, one thing is certain. No one was espousing an indefeasible,
natural law view of sovereign immunity....
If the natural law conception of sovereign immunity as an inherent
characteristic of sovereignty enjoyed by the States had been broadly accepted
at the time of the founding, one would expect to find it reflected somewhere in
the five opinions delivered by the Court in Chisholm v. Georgia
(1793). Yet that view did not appear in any of them. And since a bare two years
before Chisholm, the Bill of Rights had been added to the original
Constitution, if the Tenth Amendment had been understood to give federal
constitutional status to state sovereign immunity so as to endue it with the
equivalent of the natural law conception, one would be certain to find such a
development mentioned somewhere in the Chisholm writings. In fact,
however, not one of the opinions espoused the natural law view, and not one of
them so much as mentioned the Tenth Amendment. Not even Justice Iredell, who
alone among the Justices thought that a State could not be sued in federal
court, echoed
If the Court admits that the source of sovereign immunity is the common law, it
must also admit that the common-law doctrine could be changed by Congress
acting under the Commerce Clause. It is not for me to say which way the Court should
turn; but in either case it is clear that Alden's suit should go forward.
The Court's rationale for today's holding based on a conception of sovereign
immunity as somehow fundamental to sovereignty or inherent in statehood fails
for the lack of any substantial support for such a conception in the thinking
of the founding era. The Court cannot be counted out yet, however, for it has a
second line of argument looking to a structural basis in the Constitution's
creation of a federal system. Immunity, the Court says, "inheres in the
system of federalism established by the Constitution," its "contours
[being] determined by the founders' understanding, not by the principles or
limitations derived from natural law." Again, "[w]e look both
to the essential principles of federalism and to the special role of the state
courts in the constitutional design." That is, the Court believes that the
federal constitutional structure itself necessitates recognition of some degree
of state autonomy broad enough to include sovereign immunity from suit in a
State's own courts, regardless of the federal source of the claim asserted
against the State. If one were to read the Court's federal structure rationale
in isolation from the preceding portions of the opinion, it would appear that
the Court's position on state sovereign immunity might have been rested
entirely on federalism alone. If it had been, however, I would still be in
dissent, for the Court's argument that state court sovereign immunity on
federal questions is inherent in the very concept of federal structure is
demonstrably mistaken....
The Court has swung back and forth with regrettable disruption on the
enforceability of the FLSA against the States, but if the present majority had
a defensible position one could at least accept its decision with an
expectation of stability ahead. As it is, any such expectation would be naive.
The resemblance of today's state sovereign immunity to the Lochner
era's industrial due process is striking. The Court began this century by
imputing immutable constitutional status to a conception of economic
self-reliance that was never true to industrial life and grew insistently
fictional with the years, and the Court has chosen to close the century by
conferring like status on a conception of state sovereign immunity that is true
neither to history nor to the structure of the Constitution. I expect the
Court's late essay into immunity doctrine will prove the equal of its earlier
experiment in laissez-faire, the one being as unrealistic as the other, as
indefensible, and probably as fleeting.