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10 

ALLEN v. COOPER 

Opinion of the Court 

charge of error alone, Allen cannot overcome stare decisis. 

B 

Section  5  of  the  Fourteenth  Amendment,  unlike  almost 
all of Article I, can authorize Congress to strip the States of 
immunity.  The Fourteenth Amendment “fundamentally al-
tered the balance of state and federal power” that the orig-
inal  Constitution  and  the  Eleventh  Amendment  struck. 
Seminole Tribe, 517 U. S., at 59.  Its first section imposes 
prohibitions on the States, including (as relevant here) that 
none may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law.”  Section 5 then gives Congress
the “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation,” those lim-
itations on the States’ authority.  That power, the Court has
long held, may enable Congress to abrogate the States’ im-
munity and thus subject them to suit in federal court.  See 
Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U. S. 445, 456 (1976). 

For an abrogation statute to be “appropriate” under Sec-
tion 5, it must be tailored to “remedy or prevent” conduct 
infringing the Fourteenth Amendment’s substantive prohi-
bitions.  City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U. S. 507, 519 (1997). 
Congress can permit suits against States for actual viola-
tions of the rights guaranteed in Section 1.  See Fitzpatrick, 
427 U. S., at 456.  And to deter those violations, it can allow 
suits against States for “a somewhat broader swath of con-
duct,” including acts constitutional in themselves.  Kimel, 
528 U. S., at 81.  But Congress cannot use its “power to en-
force”  the  Fourteenth  Amendment  to  alter  what  that 
Amendment bars.  See id., at 88 (prohibiting Congress from
“substantively  redefin[ing]”  the  Fourteenth  Amendment’s
requirements).  That means a congressional abrogation is
valid under Section 5 only if it sufficiently connects to con-
duct courts have held Section 1 to proscribe. 

To  decide  whether  a  law  passes  muster,  this  Court  has
framed a type of means-end test.  For Congress’s action to 
fall  within  its  Section  5  authority,  we  have  said,  “[t]here