Court Opinion

ID: 9421791
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:59:52.603759+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:32.438279
License: Public Domain

Mr. Jüstice.Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Harlan and Mr. Justice Whittaker join,
dissenting.
The Court, acknowledging the applicability of the provisions of the Eleventh Amendment to the Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Commission, states: “The question here is whether Tennessee and Missouri have waived their immunity under the facts of this , case.” Ante, p. 277. The Court finds such a waiver in the words “sue and be sued” included in Art. I, § 3, of the Compact creating respondent Commission. The Supreme Court of Missouri has said: “A statutory provision that such a public corporation/may sue and be sued’ does not authorize a suit against it for'negligence.” Todd v. Curators of the University of Missouri, 347 Mo. 460, 465, 147 S. W. 2d 1063, 1064. The Tennessee courts have not ruled on the significance of this clause, but the Supreme Coúrt of Tennessee has been emphatic in its holding that waivers of sovereign immunity from suit are to be narrowly construed. Hill v. Beeler, 199 Tenn. 325, 286 S. W. 2d 868. The Court of Appeals below held that in neither Missouri nor Tennessee would the language “sue. and be sued” render a public corporation liable for suit in tort. 254 F. 2d 857. Three times during this Term the Court fol*284lowed its settled practice in dealing with a doubtful state statute by deferring to interpretations of local law rendered by the lower federal courts.1 We should not now disregard this settled practice but should accept the interpretation of Missouri and Tennessee law as found by the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Despite the fact that it has been authoritatively held that neither State waives sovereign immunity by the “sue and be sued” provision, this Court finds that those words constitute a waiver by the States of the immunity from suit, in the federal courts, afforded them by the Eleventh Amendment.
The legal consequences of the terms of a Compact are not, as a generalized proposition, for the originating construction of this Court. What was held in Dyer v. Sims, 341 U. S. 22, does not support such a claim. That case arose under a Compact among eight States to control pollution, in the Ohio River System. Seven of the States asserted that under the Compact West Virginia was obligated to appropriate funds for administrative éxpenses of the Joint Commission formed under the Compact. By a self-serving construction of its duty under the Compact, West Virginia resisted the claims of the other States to the Compact. Here was a typical controversy among States, a controversy as to the undertaking of a Compact among States, for the peaceful solution of which the Constitution designed Art. Ill, § 2. The very nature of the controversy made it necessary for this Court to construe the terms of the Compact, that is, the contractual obligations assumed by Wes^ Virginia vis-á-vis the other parties to the Compact. The problem presented by this case has no kinship with that presented by Dyer v. Sims. This is a suit by an individual against the States, over which the *285federal courts have jurisdiction only if the States have authorized such suits. Both States deny having given such authorization and the Court of Appeals has justified -their denial in its finding of their law. Since a Compact comes into being through an Act of Congress, its construction gives rise to a federal question. Delaware River Comm’n v. Colburn, 310 U. S. 419, 427. But a federal question does not require a federal answer by way of a blanket, nationwide substantive doctrine where essentially local interests are at stake. See, e. g., Board of County Comm’rs v. United States, 308 U. S. 343. A Compact is, after all, a contract. Ordinarily, in the interpretation of a contract, the meaning the parties attribute to the words governs • the obligations assumed in the agreement. Similarly, .since these States had the freedom to waive or to refuse to waive immunity granted by the Eleventh Amendment, the language they employed, in the Compact, not modified by Congress, should be limited to the legal significance that these States have placed upon such language, not to avoid the obligations they undertook; but to enforce the. meaning of conventional language used in their law.
This Court,, however, finds that Congress,- in granting the necessary consent to the Compact, imposed suability in the federal courts upon the States as a condition to its consent. No doubt Congress could have insisted upon a provision waiving immunity from suit in the federal courts as the price of obtaining its consent to the Compact. The fact that this Court in Keifer & Keifer v. Reconstruction Finance Corp., 306 U. S. 381, 389-391, indicated that governmental' immunity from suit had fallen into disfavor may'well have been a good reason why Congress should have done just this in passing upon the Tennesseé-Missouri Compact. It is a bad reason for this Court to write in such a waiver when Congress has not done so. Surely the doctrine of sovereign immunity was *286not so obsolete that a waiver of immunity did not require a clear indication that Congress had exacted a waiver by the States as the price of consent. The disfavor which was referred to by this Court in Keifer has not attained such acceptance as to lead this Court to disregard the strictness with which States continue to enforce it. See Great Northern Life Ins. Co. v. Read, 322 U. S. 47. Moreover, the Court’s conclusion that Congress must have understood the “sue and be sued” clause to be a waiver of the Eleventh Amendment and that therefore their consent must have been predicated on that understanding finds no support in the legislative history.2
As the evidence from which the Court finds an implied imposed withdrawal of the States’ immunity from suit is tenuous, the basis for its finding of an explicit imposition of waiver is non-existent. Such an explicit imposition is deemed to lie in the language in the Act which states that nothing in the Compact “shall be construed to affect, impair, or diminish any right, power, or jurisdiction of the United States or of any court, . . . over or in regard to any navigable waters, or any commerce between the States . . . .” Read as this should be read on the natural understanding of the phrasing, there is nothing to indicate that the subject of immunity from suit was in *287contemplation. In addition, this clause has a history of more than one hundred years which confirms and emphasizes the plain intendment of the language.
The use of clauses preserving “jurisdiction ... of any court” dates back to a Compact between New York and New Jersey approved by Congress in 1834 \ "Provided, That nothing therein contained shall be construed to impair or in. any manner affect, any right of jurisdiction of the United States in and over the islands or waters which form the subject of the said agreement.” 3. Substantially this same language may be found in other early congressional Acts consenting to interstate Compacts.4 An alternate but similar provision regarding federal jurisdiction is found iñ some other congressional consents: “Nothing herein contained shall be construed to affect the right of the United States to regulate commerce, or the jurisdic* tion of the United States over navigable waters.”5 A third variation has been: “Provided, That nothing therein contained shall be construed as impairing or in any manner affecting any right or jurisdiction of the United States in and over the region which forms the subject of said agreement.” 6 In not one of the ten cited Compacts thus approved was' there any language which could be construed .as a waiver of the constitutional immunity granted to States from suits in the federal courts. And yet the language before us, in essence conveying the same meaning, is said to have that effect.7 Indeed, the identical *288clause upon which the Court today rests'its finding of an imposed waiver of the Eleventh Amendment has appeared in at least two prior consents,to Compacts. One of these Compacts, contained a “sue and be sued” provision,8 but the other did not.9 The history of these federal jurisdiction provisions demonstrates beyond peradventure that the clause was unrelated to the question of waiver of Eleventh Amendment immunity.
The conclusion that what the language in the Act alone would not do it accomplishes when “read in light of the sue-and-be-sued clause,” ante, p. 281, violates the very congressional language on which it relies. Had there been no “sue and be sued” clause in the Compact, this Bridge Commission could not have been sued in the federal courts despité the fact that it was operating a vessel on navigable water and in interstate commerce. The Eleventh Amendment would not have permitted it. By finding that language in the Compact permits this suit, the Court is construing the' Compact to “affect,” by enlarging, the jurisdiction of the United States courts over activities conducted in interstate commerce.
The constitutional requirement of consent by Congress to a Compact between the States was designed for the protection of national interests by the power to withhold consent or to grant it on condition of appropriate safeguards of those interests. The Compact may impair the *289course of interstate commerce in a way found undesirable by Congress. Or the national interest may derive from the necessity of maintaining a properly balanced .federal system by vetoing a Compact which would adversely affect States not parties to the Compact. To imply from a congressional consent changes in the law of the Compact States of merely local concern, such as dislodging a State’s policy on suability for torts attributable to the administration of the bridge (while necessarily leaving unaffected the State’s suability for torts not attributable to its administration), would constitute a complete disregard of the purpose of the Constitution in requiring congressional consent to Compacts. Such disregard would introduce a wholly irrational disharmony in the application of local policy;
In view of the authorities cited by the Court fof the proposition that the Jones Act applies to the Commission,10 I assume that the Court is referring solely to the substantive applicability of that Act. Believing as I do that the federal courts have no jurisdiction over this suit, I do not reach that substantive question.
I would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth. Circuit.

 Sims v. United States, 359 U. S. 108; The Tungus v. Skovgaard, 358 U. S. 588; United Pilots Assn. v. Halecki, 358 U. S. 613.

 See S. Rep. No. 1198, 81st Cong., 1st Sess.; H. .R. Rep. No. 1429, 81st Cong., 1st Sess.; 95 Cong. Rec. 14589-14590, 14982-14983. In letters to the House and Senate Committees considering the bill consenting to this Tennessee-Missouri Compact, Acting Secretary of Commerce Thomas C. Blaisdell, Jr., expressed his belief that “this provision is intended to avoid the application to the Federal Government of the specific provision found in the compact that ‘Such bonds shall be the negotiable bonds of the Commission, the income from which shall be tax free.’. . S. Rep. No. 1198, supra, at 3; H. R. Rep. No. 1429, supra, at 3. To avoid the possibility that the provision was not sufficiently clear, Congress added specific language stating that the bonds issued by the Commission were taxable by the United States. 63 Stat. 930.

 4 Stat. 711.

 20 Stat. 483 ; 21 Stat. 352 (added “jurisdiction of its courts”); 25 Stat. 553 (added “jurisdiction of its courts”); 34 Stat. 861.

 40 Stat. 515. Similar language is found in 41 Stat. 158.

 42 Stat. 180. See similar language in 45 Stat. 301; 45 Stat. 121.

 In some Compacts there have been similar though not identical .federal jurisdiction clauses in the Compacts themselves, although those Compacts did not contain suability provisions. 66 Stat. 74, 77-78; 68'Stat. 690,-697. In the recently approved Compact between *288California and Oregon involving the Klamath River Basin, 71 Stat. 497, the Compact itself contains clauses rendering suits possible against state agencies and also a clause reserving federal jurisdiction, in its terms similar to the provisions in prior congressional consents to Compacts. Yet another provision states that nothing in the Compact shall be construed as “Enlarging, diminishing or otherwise affecting the jurisdiction of the courts of the United States.” 71 Stat. 508. It was, clearly enough, not believed that these provisions were inconsistent with each other.

 49 Stat. 1058, 1060.

 64 Stat. 568, 571.

 Suit in United States v. California, 297 U. S. 175, was instituted by the United States, and jurisdiction over such an action is not within the proscription of the Eleventh Amendment. In California v. Taylor, 353 U. S. 553, the State intervened in an action brought .against the National Railroad Adjustment Board, hence voluntarily submitted itself to the jurisdiction of the federal courts.