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Page Number: 11

8 

ALLEN v. COOPER 

Opinion of the Court 

debtor and his estate, and not on the creditors” (including a
State).  Id., at 369–370 (internal quotation marks omitted).
For that reason, we thought, “it does not implicate States’ 
sovereignty to nearly the same degree as other kinds of ju-
risdiction.”  Id., at 362.  In remaining part, Katz focused on 
the Bankruptcy Clause’s “unique history.”  Id., at 369, n. 9. 
The Clause emerged from a felt need to curb the States’ au-
thority.  The  States,  we  explained,  “had  wildly  divergent 
schemes”  for  discharging  debt,  and  often  “refus[ed]  to  re-
spect  one  another’s  discharge  orders.”  Id.,  at  365,  377. 
“[T]he Framers’ primary goal” in adopting the Clause was
to address that problem—to stop “competing sovereigns[ ]” 
from interfering with a debtor’s discharge.  Id., at 373.  And 
in that project, the Framers intended federal courts to play 
a leading role.  The nation’s first Bankruptcy Act, for exam-
ple,  empowered  those  courts  to  order  that  States  release 
people they were holding in debtors’ prisons.  See id., at 374. 
So  through  and  through,  we  thought,  the  Bankruptcy
Clause embraced the idea that federal courts could impose 
on  state  sovereignty.  In  that,  it  was  sui  generis—again, 
“unique”—among Article I’s grants of authority.  Id., at 369, 
n. 9. 

Indeed, Katz’s view of the Bankruptcy Clause had a yet 
more striking aspect, which further separates it from any
other.  The Court might have concluded from its analysis 
that the Clause allows Congress to abrogate the States’ sov-
ereign immunity (as Allen argues the Intellectual Property 
Clause does).  But it did not; it instead went further.  Rely-
ing  on  the  above  account  of  the  Framers’  intentions,  the
Court found that the Bankruptcy Clause itself did the abro-
gating.  Id., at 379 (“[T]he relevant ‘abrogation’ is the one
effected in the plan of the [Constitutional] Convention”).  Or 
stated another way, we decided that no congressional abro-
gation was needed because the States had already “agreed 
in  the  plan  of  the  Convention  not  to  assert  any  sovereign 
immunity defense” in bankruptcy proceedings.  Id., at 377.