Court Opinion

ID: 9430665
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:18.721841+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:25.588352
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
with whom Justice Marshall, Justice Blackmun, and Justice Stevens join, concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part.
Although I join Parts I and III of the Court’s opinion and agree with the result in Part II-C, I do not join Parts II-A and II-B for the reasons stated in my dissent in Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 258-302 (1985) (Brennan, J., dissenting).
The Court makes a valiant effort to set forth the principles that determine whether a particular claim is or is not barred by the Eleventh Amendment. See ante, at 276-279. To my mind, the Court’s restatement simply underscores the implausibility of the entire venture, for it clearly demonstrates that the Court’s Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence consists of little more than a number of ad hoc and unmanageable rules bearing little or no relation to one another or to any coherent framework; indeed, the Court’s best efforts to impose order on the cases in this area has produced only the conclusion that “[f ]or Eleventh Amendment purposes, the line between permitted and prohibited suits will often be indistinct,” ante, at 278. This hodgepodge produces no positive benefits to society. Its only effect is to impair or prevent effective enforcement of federal law. It is highly unlikely that, having created a system in which federal law was to be supreme, the Framers of the Constitution or of the Elev*293enth Amendment nonetheless intended for that law to be unenforceable in the broad class of cases now barred by this Court’s precedents. In fact, as I demonstrated last Term in Atascadero, the Framers intended no such thing.
The magnitude of the Court’s mistake has only been increased by changes that have taken place in our law and our society since Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U. S. 1 (1890), took the first step down this ill-advised path, for the National Government and federal law play a much more important role in protecting the rights of individuals today. Only stare de-cisis can support the Court’s continued adherence to this unfortunate doctrine. Stare decisis is indeed a force to be reckoned with — although the Court has not felt itself particularly constrained by stare decisis in expanding the protective mantle of sovereign immunity, see Pennhurst State School & Hospital v. Halderman, 465 U. S. 89, 165-166, n. 50 (1984) (Stevens, J., dissenting); Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, supra, at 304 (Stevens, J., dissenting). However, as Chief Justice Taney observed, the authority of the Court’s construction of the Constitution ultimately “depend[s] altogether on the force of the reasoning by which it is supported.” Passenger Cases, 7 How. 283, 470 (1849) (dissenting opinion). The Court’s Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence is not supported by history or by sound legal reasoning; it is simply bad law. In matters of such great institutional importance as this, stare decisis must yield.