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ALLEN v. COOPER 

Syllabus 

the States’ immunity from suit, Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, 517 
U. S. 44, 56, and some constitutional provision allows Congress to have
thus encroached on the States’ sovereignty.  Congress used clear lan-
guage to abrogate the States’ immunity from copyright infringement 
suits  in  the  CRCA.  Allen  contends  that  Congress’s  constitutional
power to do so arises either from the Intellectual Property Clause, Art. 
I, §8, cl. 8, or from Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which au-
thorizes  Congress  to  “enforce”  the  commands  of  the  Due  Process 
Clause.  Each contention is foreclosed by precedent.  Pp. 4–6.

(b) The Intellectual Property Clause enables Congress to grant both
copyrights and patents.  In Allen’s view, Congress’s authority to abro-
gate sovereign immunity from copyright suits naturally follows, in or-
der  to  “secur[e]”  a  copyright  holder’s  “exclusive  Right”  as  against  a 
State’s  intrusion.    But  that  theory  was  rejected  in  Florida  Prepaid. 
That case considered the constitutionality of the Patent Remedy Act,
which, like the CRCA, attempted to put  “States on the same footing
as private parties” in patent infringement lawsuits.  527 U. S., at 647, 
648.  Florida Prepaid acknowledged that Congress’s goal of providing 
uniform remedies in infringement cases was a “proper Article I con-
cern,” but held that Seminole Tribe precluded Congress from using its 
Article  I  powers  “to  circumvent”  the  limits  sovereign  immunity
“place[s] upon federal jurisdiction,” 517 U. S., at 73.  For the same rea-
son, Article I cannot support the CRCA.  Allen reads Central Va. Com-
munity College v. Katz, 546 U. S. 356 to have replaced Seminole Tribe’s 
general rule with a clause-by-clause approach to evaluating whether a
particular constitutional provision allows the abrogation of sovereign 
immunity.  But Katz rested on the unique history of the Bankruptcy 
Clause.  546 U. S., at 369, n. 9.  And even if the limits of Katz’s holding 
were not so clear, Florida Prepaid, together with stare decisis, would 
doom Allen’s argument.  Overruling Florida Prepaid would require 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, which Allen does not offer.  Pp. 6–10.

(c) Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment allows Congress to ab-
rogate  the  States’  immunity  as  part  of  its  power  “to  enforce”  the 
Amendment’s substantive prohibitions.  City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 
U. S. 507, 519.  For Congress’s action to fall within its Section 5 au-
thority, “[t]here must be a congruence and proportionality between the 
injury  to  be  prevented  or  remedied  and  the  means  adopted  to  that
end.”  Id., at 520.  This test requires courts to consider the nature and 
extent  of  state  conduct  violating  the  Fourteenth  Amendment  and  to
examine the scope of Congress’s response to that injury.  Florida Pre-
paid again serves as the critical precedent.  There, the Court defined