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OCTOBER TERM, 1997

381

Syllabus

WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
et al. v. SCHACHT

certiorari to the united states court of appeals for
the seventh circuit

No. 97–461. Argued April 20, 1998—Decided June 22, 1998

Respondent Schacht ﬁled a state-court suit against the defendants (peti-
tioners here), the Wisconsin Department of Corrections and several of
its employees, both in their “personal” and in their “ofﬁcial” capacities,
alleging that his dismissal from his prison guard position violated the
Federal Constitution and federal civil rights laws. The defendants re-
moved the case to federal court and then ﬁled an answer raising the
“defense” that the Eleventh Amendment doctrine of sovereign immu-
nity barred the claims against the Department and its employees in
their ofﬁcial capacity. The District Court granted the individual de-
fendants summary judgment on the “personal capacity” claims and dis-
missed the claims against the Department and the individual defendants
in their “ofﬁcial capacity.” On appeal, Schacht challenged only the dis-
position of the “personal capacity” claims, but the Seventh Circuit deter-
mined that the removal had been improper because the presence of even
one claim subject to an Eleventh Amendment bar deprives the federal
courts of removal jurisdiction over the entire case.

Held: The presence in an otherwise removable case of a claim barred by
the Eleventh Amendment does not destroy removal jurisdiction that
would otherwise exist. A federal court can proceed to hear the remain-
ing claims, and the District Court did not err in doing so in this case.
Pp. 386–393.

(a) Title 28 U. S. C. § 1441(a), which allows a defendant to remove
“any civil action brought in a State court of which the [federal] district
courts . . . have original jurisdiction,” obviously permits the removal
of a case containing only claims that “arise under” federal law, since
federal courts have original jurisdiction over such claims, see § 1331.
There are several parts to respondent’s argument that removal juris-
diction is destroyed if one of those federal claims is subject to an Elev-
enth Amendment bar. First, the argument distinguishes cases with
both federal-law and state-law claims from cases with federal-law claims
that include one or more Eleventh Amendment claims.
In the former
cases the state-law claims fall within the federal courts’ supplemental
jurisdiction.
In the latter cases the comparable claims are ones that
the Eleventh Amendment prohibits the federal courts from deciding.