Opinion ID: 3036584
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Other Forms of Relief

Text: Beyond the return of the class’s property, the complaint requests some forms of relief that would permissibly require the Controller’s prospective compliance with federal law, and some other forms of relief that arguably would impermissibly require compensation from the State treasury. The Supreme Court in Ex parte Young held that a federal court could enjoin a state officer to conform his future behavior to federal law. 209 U.S. at 159-60. Ex parte Young created an exception to 10 See Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 1300(c) (limiting the applicability of “[e]scheat . . . to property the whereabouts of whose owner is unknown or whose owner is unknown”). 2652 SUEVER v. CONNELL the Eleventh Amendment by holding that a state official who acts unconstitutionally is “stripped of his official or representative character and is subjected in his person to the consequences of his individual conduct” because the State could not grant immunity for such an act. Id. at 160. Decades later, in Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U.S. 651 (1974), the Court limited the scope of Ex Parte Young’s exception to prospective equitable relief and state funds “ancillary” to such relief; the Eleventh Amendment bars retroactive compensation to plaintiffs from State funds. Id. at 663-69. [4] The district court erred when it found that the Ex parte Young exception to the Eleventh Amendment did not apply to the class’s amended complaint in its entirety because the complaint “fails to allege an ‘ongoing violation of federal law’ or to seek ‘relief properly characterized as prospective.’ ” The amended complaint alleges types of harm that, if proven, would amount to “ongoing violation[s] of federal law”: including the Controller’s practices of publishing constitutionally inadequate notice for property to be escheated, seizing assets that are ineligible for escheat, and misplacing escheated property so that it cannot be returned to its owner. The complaint requests prospective relief to remedy these ongoing violations: including an injunction to require the Controller to publish constitutionally adequate notice, to refrain from seizing property ineligible for escheat, and to undertake an accounting of funds illegally held within the State’s escheat system. See Taylor, 402 F.3d at 935-36. By contrast, other types of requested relief are clearly barred by the Eleventh Amendment, for example, where the relief is premised solely on the State’s compliance with state law. See Pennhurst State Sch. & Hosp. v. Halderman, 465 U.S. 89, 105-06 (1984). Apart from such prohibited relief, we leave it to the district court upon remand to determine which types of requested relief are permissibly prospective and which would impermissibly be “ ‘in practical effect indistinguishable in many aspects from an award of damages against the State.’ ” See Taylor, 402 F.3d at 935 (quoting Edelman, 415 U.S. at 668). SUEVER v. CONNELL 2653