Opinion ID: 6108240
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Sovereign Immunity and Article 5, Section 20 of the 1874 Arkansas Constitution

Text: Sovereign Immunity holds an interesting place in the American legal system. Hailing from pre-colonial England, it is said to be rooted in the Latin phrase rex non potest peccare : the king can do no wrong. The principle is generally understood to stand for the proposition that the sovereign cannot be sued unless it has specifically consented to suit. Obviously, there is no king of the United States of America; in fact, this country fought the Revolutionary War to rid itself of such a regime. Accordingly, some consider sovereign immunity an anachronistic relic that should be eliminated from American law. Erwin Chemerinsky, Against Sovereign Immunity , 53 Stan. L. Rev. 1201 , 1201-02 (2001). Even so, the doctrine of sovereign immunity has lived on in this country through its application by the courts. As the United States Supreme Court has observed, [T]he principle has never been discussed or the reasons for it given, but it has always been treated as an established doctrine. United States v. Lee , 106 U.S. 196 , 207, 1 S.Ct. 240 , 27 L.Ed. 171 (1882). Under either pre-colonial England's conception of sovereign immunity 1 or that which has been afforded to the individual States of this country 2 , the sovereign has the absolute authority to waive its immunity, if it wishes to do so. The phrase sovereign immunity does not appear in the Arkansas Constitution. However, the Arkansas Supreme Court has confounded the concept of sovereign immunity with article 5, section 20 of the Arkansas Constitution, which provides that (t)he State of Arkansas shall never be made defendant in any of her courts. In both Andrews and the case-at-bar, the majority latches on with a death grip to these fourteen words, elevating them above the remainder of the Arkansas Constitution, and opines that harms committed by State actors against the people of this State are shielded from accountability by sovereign immunity. Further, the majority holds  that article 5, section 20 prohibits the General Assembly from abrogating that immunity to facilitate redress of the harms inflicted by those State actors upon the people. This holding evinces a complete lack of understanding of sovereign immunity as a general matter, and amounts to a studied indifference to all other provisions of the Arkansas Constitution, as well as our rules for interpreting the same. Article 5, section 20 is by no means the mechanism that affords the State of Arkansas sovereign immunity; instead, it is simply one single provision found in the legislative article (article 5) of the Arkansas Constitution that must be interpreted alongside each of the other provisions contained throughout the same constitution. Over the years, this court has acknowledged what it describes as sovereign immunity, pointing to article 5, section 20, but our opinions on this subject have not yielded any consistently enforceable rule for purposes of stare decisis. Some of our cases suggest that article 5, 20 means the State of Arkansas cannot be sued in an Arkansas state court under any circumstances whatsoever. See, e.g. , Ark. State Highway Comm'n v. Nelson Bros. , 191 Ark. 629 , 634, 636, 87 S.W.2d 394 , 396 (1935) (The language of the quoted prohibition is so precise and clear as to admit of no room for interpretation or for any refinement of judicial construction which would obscure or change the common and ordinary meaning of the words employed.... No one has a vested right to sue the state even when that privilege may be, and has been, given[.]). Other cases have suggested that there are three exceptions to article 5, section 20 : (1) when the State is the moving party seeking specific relief, (2) when a plaintiff seeks to enjoin a state official from acting unlawfully, and (3) when an act of the legislature has created a waiver of immunity. See, e.g. , Mitchem v. Hobbs , 2014 Ark. 233 , 2014 WL 2019278 . More recently, our cases have suggested that the sovereign immunity afforded by article 5, section 20 is an affirmative defense that can be raised or waived whenever the State is haled into court. Walther v. FLIS Enters., Inc. , 2018 Ark. 64 , 540 S.W.3d 264 . In Andrews , this court held that article 5, section 20's purported conferral of sovereign immunity upon the State of Arkansas prohibits the Arkansas General Assembly from enacting any legislation that could lead to a citizen haling the State or any of its instrumentalities into a State court. Here, the majority holds that Andrews controls the outcome of this case, since Barnes's complaint, which alleges racial discrimination and unlawful retaliation, is brought pursuant to the AWBA, a product of the General Assembly. I submit that this court's prior decisions discussing article 5, section 20 are in irreconcilable conflict, and that Andrews only compounded that conflict. As discussed in greater detail herein, the proper resolution to this case is to simply read the applicable provisions of the 1874 Arkansas Constitution as they were written, something that the majority has failed to do in either Andrews or the case at bar. One cannot read article 5, section 20 in isolation. Instead, as noted above, one must analyze each individual provision of our constitution alongside the others contained therein. See Ward, supra. When one appropriately interprets our constitution as a whole, it is apparent that article 5, section 20 does not prevent Barnes from pursuing judicial redress of her asserted grievances in this case.