State sovereign immunity means that a state must consent to be sued in its own court system. This concept is based on early English law, which provided that the Crown could not be sued in English courts without its consent.

The doctrine of sovereign immunity was in effect in the states that were in existence at the time of the drafting of the Constitution. Further, various writings by the founding fathers seemed to support the concept. Although the Hans Court answered the issue of whether adoption of Article III of the Constitution had waived state sovereign immunity in federal courts, it left a number of questions unanswered.

For instance, the question as to whether there are any instances where Congress could, by statute, abrogate a state's sovereign immunity, so that a citizen could sue a state under federal law. In Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, the Court seemed to answer that in most cases, such suits would not be accepted. The Seminole case involved the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of , which provided Indian tribes with an opportunity to establish gambling operations. However, to establish such gambling, the Indian tribes had to enter into a compact with the state in which they were located.

The states, in turn, were obligated to negotiate with the Indian tribes in good faith, and this requirement was made enforceable in federal court. Thus, the question arose as to whether the tribes could sue the states under the Eleventh Amendment.

The Court in Seminole found it important to establish what constitutional authority was being exercised by the passage of the Indian Gaming Law. The Court had found previously in Pennsylvania v. Union Gas , that the Commerce Power, as a plenary power, was so broad that of necessity it required the ability to abrogate state sovereign immunity.

In Seminole , however, the Court overturned Union Gas , holding that as the Eleventh Amendment was ratified after the passage of the Constitution and Article I, it was a limitation on Congress's authority to waive a state's sovereign immunity under that Article.

The Court did indicate, however, that Congress can abrogate state sovereignty under the Fourteenth Amendment. While the logic behind this distinction is unclear, it means that in many cases, litigants suing states will try to find a Fourteenth Amendment basis for federal legislation to defeat an Eleventh Amendment defense.

A question left unanswered by the Hans decision was whether the Eleventh Amendment, which prohibited Congress from abrogating a state's sovereign immunity in federal court, extended to a state's own courts. In Alden v. Maine , the Supreme Court found that the same principles of sovereign immunity identified in Hans would prevent Congress from authorizing a state to be sued in its own courts without permission.

As in Hans , the Court acknowledged that the literal text of the Eleventh Amendment does not prohibit such suits, as its language addresses only suits brought in federal courts. Consequently, the Court relied instead on the proposition that sovereign immunity is a "fundamental postulate" of the constitutional design, and is not amenable to congressional abrogation. The same reasoning that prohibited these suits from being brought in federal court, a deference to the "respect and dignity" of state sovereignty, led the Court to conclude that it would be anomalous to allow such cases to be brought instead in state court.

In Federal Maritime Comm'n v. South Carolina State Ports Authority , the Court addressed the issue of whether state sovereign immunity extended to proceedings before federal agencies. The cruise ship company, Maritime Services, filed a claim with the Federal Maritime Commission FMC arguing that South Carolina had discriminated against it in violation of the Shipping Act of and sought, among other things, damages for loss of profits.

In reviewing the case, the Court analogized between the FMC's quasi-judicial proceedings and traditional judicial proceedings, while noting that "[t]he preeminent purpose of state sovereign immunity is to accord States the dignity that is consistent with their status as sovereign entities. Thus, while an agency remains capable of enforcement actions against states in federal court, it cannot use its own adjudicative process to determine whether to do so, but must rely on its investigatory powers.

It should be noted that in many instances, the federal government still has the ability to influence state behavior despite the constitutional limits discussed above.

Considering the large amount of funds provided to states by the federal government, this represents a significant power for Congress to exercise. Further, as the concept of grant conditioning can involve waiver by the states of Tenth Amendment rights, these grant conditions may allow Congress to indirectly achieve compliance by a state in a way that could not be achieved directly.

The question of whether a state can be required to perform or refrain from certain actions was addressed in the Supreme Court case of South Dakota v. The state of South Dakota, which permitted year-olds to purchase beer, brought suit arguing that the law was an invalid exercise of Congress's power under the Spending Clause to provide for the "general welfare.

The Court noted that the grant condition did not implicate an independent constitutional bar i. Further, the court noted that the grant condition was not a violation of the Tenth Amendment, which generally prevents Congress from "commandeering" state legislatures and executive branch officials to implement federal programs. The Court did suggest, however, that there were limits to Congress's power under the Spending Clause. First, a grant condition must be related to the particular national projects or programs to which the money was being directed.

Second, the Court suggested that, in some circumstances, the financial inducements offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which "pressure turns into compulsion," which would suggest a violation of the Tenth Amendment.

In Dole , however, the percentage of highway funds that were to be withheld from a state with a drinking age below 21 was relatively small, so that Congress's program did not coerce the states to enact higher minimum drinking ages than they would otherwise choose. Sebelius , however, seemed to suggest that an alternative line of analysis might apply in some grant condition cases.

Following the enactment of the ACA, state attorneys general and others brought several lawsuits challenging various provisions of the act on constitutional grounds. As noted in Dole , the loss of federal funds associated with a grant condition cannot be so large that the withholding of such funds is coercive.

Justice Roberts's opinion in NFIB , however, addressed the slightly different question of whether a grant condition attached to a "new and independent" program here, the Medicaid expansion that threatened the funding of an existing program here, Medicaid violated the Tenth Amendment.

It is unclear, therefore, whether the NFIB decision was an application of the Dole analysis, or whether the combination of factors presented in NFIB suggests an alternate line of reasoning.

Justice Roberts's opinion in NFIB held that, in the case of existing program funding being conditioned on the adoption of a "new and independent" program, the amount of federal funds at issue cannot represent a significant portion of a state's budget or its withdrawal will be found to be unconstitutionally coercive under the Tenth Amendment. Justice Roberts did not identify a standard to determine what level of withholding funds would be coercive, or specify what kind of distinguishing factors were necessary to such analysis.

It is not clear, however, whether the confluence of factors at issue in the NFIB case is likely to be present in future cases. Few federal programs, for instance, even approach the level of state funding as does Medicaid; nor do there appear to be significant examples of grant conditions requiring creation of "new and independent" programs in order to retain funding for a separate program.

Consequently, the NFIB case may have minimal effect on the validity of existing or future federal grant conditions. It would appear that the status of the state in the federal system has been strengthened by recent Supreme Court opinions.

Although the Court has not scaled back the federal government's substantive jurisdiction significantly, it has to some extent prevented the expansion of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause and under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Further it has created a variety of obstacles as to how these powers can be executed, forbidding Congress under the Tenth Amendment from commandeering the authority of state legislative and executive branches, and limiting the authority of Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity. Ultimately, however, Congress retains significant powers to influence state behavior, such as through the Spending Clause, and, under the Supremacy Clause, Congress may require the enforcement of its laws in both state and federal court.

See, e. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records, and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof. This "Full Faith and Credit Clause" gives Congress what amounts to enforcement authority over the required recognition by each state of the judgments, records, and legislation of other states.

Article I, Section 1, of the Constitution provides that "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States. Maryland, 17 U. To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

While the Fifteenth Amendment and the other voting rights guarantees noted above protect only against state action, congressional authority under this clause includes protection of the electoral process against private interference. A variety of enactments can be traced to this authority, including campaign finance laws and the Hatch Act insofar as it applies to federal elections. The House and the Senate act as judicial tribunals in resolving contested election cases.

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District Implicit in the Fifth Amendment's requirement that just compensation be paid for private property that is taken for a public use is the existence of the government's power to take private property for public use.

Those materials which do address congressional control over commerce focus on the necessity of uniformity in matters of foreign commerce, although the drafters clearly intended domestic commerce to be regulated as well. Lerner, The Founder's Constitution Alexander Hamilton, Continentalist, No. Lerner, supra note 32 "The vesting of the power of regulating trade ought to have been a principal object of the confederation for a variety of reasons.

It is as necessary for the purposes of commerce as of revenue. United States v. Darby, U. See Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, U. McClung, U. The Court failed to note that to some extent, the three categories are intertwined.

For instance, the first category, the regulation of "streams" or "channels" of commerce, allows regulation of the creation, movement, sale and consumption of merchandise or services. But the initial extension of the "streams" of commerce analysis by the Court to intrastate trade was justified by the "effect" of these other activities on commerce.

See NLRB v. Similarly, the second category, which allows the regulation of such instrumentalities of commerce as planes, trains or trucks, is also based on the theory that a threat to these instrumentalities "affects" commerce, even if the effect is local in nature.

Southern Railway Company v. Thus, the final category identified by the Court appears to be a catch-all for all other activities which "substantially affect" commerce. The Court rejected arguments that possession of guns in school affected the national economy by its negative impact on education.

The Court has reiterated its concern over extending Commerce Clause powers to Congress in areas of the law traditionally reserved to the states. Army Corps of Engineers, U. The requirement that a commerce clause regulation be economic or commercial has been influential in a number of subsequent statutory interpretation cases. In Jones v. Section i , which, in part, makes it a crime to destroy by fire or explosive a building "used" in interstate commerce.

Applying the statutory canon that one should interpret a statute to avoid constitutional doubt, Jones v. The Court construed the statute to require that a building protected by Section i be "actively employed" for commercial purposes, id. The Court held that this interpretation of the statute would raise serious constitutional questions, requiring, for instance, a close examination of precisely what activity was being regulated. Absent a clear statement from Congress that it intended the Clean Water Act to have such a broad reach, the Court found the rule was not supported by the statute.

See also Rapanos v. I, Section 8, cl. Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, U. One plaintiff in Lane claimed he was unable to appear to answer criminal charges on the second floor of a courthouse that had no elevator. The second plaintiff, a certified court reporter, claimed she was denied the opportunity both to work and to participate in the judicial process because she was unable to access numerous county courthouses.

The Court cited congressional evidence that legislative attempts preceding Title II inadequately addressed the problem of patterned unconstitutional treatment in access to the courts. The Court held that it need not examine Title II as a whole when evaluating the remedy's congruence and proportionality to the injury of disability discrimination in access to the courts. The relevant inquiry solely concerned Title II's scope as applied to the rights associated with access to judicial services.

The Court cited as precedent for this limited application approach the Garrett case, in which it considered only Title I of the ADA for purposes of Fourteenth Amendment analysis. Based on this narrow scope of inquiry, the Court determined that both the pattern of past discrimination in access to the courts and the failure of previous legislative attempts to remedy the injury were sufficient to hold that Title II is a valid exercise of Congress's power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

As noted by Chief Justice Rehnquist in dissent, U. See id. Title II does not require states to compromise the integrity of public programs or make unduly burdensome changes to public facilities. Rather, states need only take reasonable measures to comply with Title II regulations. In National League of Cities v. Usery , the Court conceded that the legislation under attack, which regulated the wages and hours of certain state and local governmental employees, was undoubtedly within the scope of the Commerce Clause, but it cautioned that there are attributes of sovereignty attaching to every state government which may not be impaired by Congress, not because Congress may lack an affirmative grant of legislative authority to reach the matter, but because the Constitution prohibits it from exercising the authority in that manner.

Justice Blackmun's opinion for the Court in Garcia concluded that the National League of Cities test for "integral operations" in areas of traditional governmental functions had proven impractical, and that the Court in had "tried to repair what did not need repair. VI, cl. It should be noted that not all suits in which a state is involved is a "suit" against a state. In Tennessee Student Assistance Corp. Hood, U. In that case, the Court addressed whether Eleventh Amendment immunity extended to an adversary proceeding initiated by a debtor seeking an undue hardship discharge of her state-held student loan debt.

The Court held that the proceeding did not constitute a suit against the state for purposes of the Eleventh Amendment. The Court noted that the bankruptcy petition in question was an in rem proceeding, so that the court's jurisdiction was over the petitioner's debt, rather than over her person or the state.

Thus, the federal bankruptcy court's exercise of jurisdiction over the state-held debt did not infringe upon the state's sovereignty immunity. One apparent argument is that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Eleventh Amendment and thus, unlike legislative powers found in Article I of the Constitution, it can be seen as an alteration of the restrictions of the Eleventh Amendment. However, as is discussed in detail below, the Supreme Court has held that state sovereign immunity preceded and predated the Constitution.

Alden v. Maine, U. Consequently, all the Articles of the Constitution could arguably be seen as altering the restrictions of the state sovereign immunity. Another argument made by the Court in Seminole is that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to alter the pre-existing balance between state and federal power at the time of its passage. This argument is more plausible, but is still difficult to differentiate between Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment and Congress's power under the Articles of the Constitution.

Like the Fourteenth Amendment, the Articles of the Constitution were clearly intended to alter the balance between state and federal power at the time of the passage of the Constitution, which included state sovereign immunity.

This is exemplified by the Supremacy Clause, U. The Court noted that "[there are] numerous common features shared by administrative adjudications and judicial proceedings. The proceedings are adversary in nature.

They are conducted before a trier of fact insulated from political influence. A party is entitled to present his case by oral or documentary evidence, and the transcript of testimony and exhibits together with the pleadings constitutes the exclusive record for decision. The parties are entitled to know the findings and conclusions on all of the issues of fact, law, or discretion presented on the record. Justice Breyer noted that after this decision "a private person cannot bring a complaint against a State to a federal administrative agency where the agency 1 will use an internal adjudicative process to decide if the complaint is well founded, and 2 if so, proceed to court to enforce the law.

For instance, the federal government has, in some cases, made the application of federal regulatory authority contingent, so that if a state chooses to regulate in that field, the federal regulatory role is circumscribed. In many cases, this will encourage states to regulate, so that the state has closer control of the application of such regulation within the state.

It would seem that sovereign immunity is a core state power, and that requiring its waiver would raise Tenth Amendment concerns. Usery, U. As discussed previously, however, the Court has, for the time being, abandoned this line of cases.

Garcia v. However, these seven Justices either wrote or joined one of two separate opinions on this issue, and did not join in either the reasoning or judgment of the other opinion. However, while Garcia has never been explicitly overruled, in subsequent cases the Court has indeed found judicially-enforceable limits on the power of the federal government to regulate states and their political subdivisions directly.

United States , forcing state or local executive officials to implement federal laws, Printz v. Dole Interestingly, the Tenth Amendment has not been invoked by the Court to protect individual citizens against the exercise of federal power. Whether the Tenth Amendment actually is, or ought to be, serving as an independent source of constitutional principles of federalism is a matter of great controversy, both on and off the Court. When initially added to the United States Constitution, the Tenth Amendment stood as a reminder of the continuing importance of states and of the foundational role of the people.

The Amendment was significant not for the text it supplied, but for the structure it emphasized. That structure has evolved over time. Recently, the United States Supreme Court has sought to revive the Amendment, with unfortunate results. The Court has found in the Amendment a license to create new barriers to the exercise of national authority, barriers that lack foundation in the text or structure of the Constitution or in sound policies of federalism. In the early part of the Twentieth Century, the Supreme Court relied on the Tenth Amendment in resisting expanded assertions of national power.

However, during the New Deal, Congress enacted a range of federal regulatory programs, such as Social Security, designed to stabilize the economy, protect workers, and promote the general welfare. Constitutional law. After a brief reemergence, the Tenth Amendment went back underground in , before returning, apparently to stay, in Good reasons existed for the disappearance of the Tenth Amendment.

The Tenth Amendment suffered from the assertion that the powers reserved to the states included the power to enforce racial inequality. Politically, socially, and morally, the Tenth Amendment seemed to speak to the past, not the present or the future. Along similar lines, the Court invoked the Eleventh Amendment to limit the ability of Congress to subject states to suit in federal court, even for claims that the states were violating federal law.

Even while reinvigorating the Tenth Amendment in New York v. In its current incarnation, however, the function of the Tenth Amendment is to impose a non-textual limit on the use of federal power. The Court has held that even when the federal government is regulating interstate commerce, as authorized by Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, the federal government still may not invade certain protected enclaves of state sovereignty. For example, in New York v. United States , the Court held that the Tenth Amendment prohibited Congress from enacting a comprehensive plan for the disposal of radioactive waste that required states to assume responsibility for the disposal of waste within their borders.

That reading runs counter to the text of the Tenth Amendment. By way of policy justification, the Court has suggested that it must draw clear lines between domains of state and federal authority. The blurring of federal and state functions, the Court asserts, would undermine the accountability of government officials. The citizens would not know to which government entity they should address policy concerns. Scholars have questioned the empirical underpinnings of this line of argument.

Federalism Main Federalism is one of the most important and innovative concepts in the U. Learn More. Enumerated Powers One way to limit the power of the new Congress under the Constitution was to be specific about what it could do. The Commerce Power The most broad-ranging power of the federal government has become the Commerce Clause.

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