Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-877_dc8f.pdf
Page Number: 12

Cite as:  589 U. S. ____ (2020) 

9 

Opinion of the Court 

We therefore discarded our usual rule—which Allen accepts 
as  applying  here—that  Congress  must  speak,  and  indeed
speak  unequivocally,  to  abrogate  sovereign  immunity.
Compare  id.,  at  378–379  (“[O]ur  decision  today”  does  not 
“rest[ ] on any statement Congress ha[s] made on the sub-
ject of state sovereign immunity”), with supra, at 5 (our or-
dinary rule).  Our decision, in short, viewed bankruptcy as 
on  a  different  plane,  governed  by  principles  all  its  own. 
Nothing in that understanding invites the kind of general, 
“clause-by-clause” reexamination of Article I that Allen pro-
poses.  See supra, at 7.  To the contrary, it points to a good-
for-one-clause-only holding. 

And even if Katz’s confines were not so clear, Florida Pre-
paid,  together  with  stare  decisis,  would  still  doom  Allen’s 
argument.  As Allen recognizes, if the Intellectual Property
Clause permits the CRCA’s abrogation, it also would permit
the Patent Remedy Act’s.  See Tr. of Oral Arg. 9 (predicting
that if his position prevailed, “ultimately, the Patent Rem-
edy Act would be revisited and properly upheld as a valid 
exercise of Congress’s Article I power”).  Again, there is no
difference  between  copyrights  and  patents  under  the 
Clause, nor any material difference between the two stat-
utes’ provisions.  See supra, at 3, and n. 1, 6.  So we would 
have to overrule Florida Prepaid if we were to decide this 
case Allen’s way.  But stare decisis, this Court has under-
stood, is a “foundation stone of the rule of law.”  Michigan 
v. Bay Mills Indian Community, 572 U. S. 782, 798 (2014).
To reverse a decision, we demand a “special justification,” 
over and above the belief “that the precedent was wrongly 
decided.”  Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 573 
U. S. 258, 266 (2014).  Allen offers us nothing special at all;
he contends only that if the Court were to use a clause-by-
clause approach, it would discover that Florida Prepaid was 
wrong (because, he says again, the decision misjudged Con-
gress’s  authority  under  the  Intellectual  Property  Clause).
See Brief for Petitioners 37; supra, at 6–7.  And with that