Court Opinion

ID: 9491778
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:23:43.56065+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:56.642645
License: Public Domain

RYAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
While I concur in my brothers’ view that the district court correctly abstained from exercising its jurisdiction in this case, I decline to go further and join my brothers in affirming the judgment on Eleventh Amendment grounds.
The majority opinion posits, and indeed rather persuasively so, that the Eleventh Amendment bars the plaintiffs’ federal claims against the state despite the doctrine announced in Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123, 28 S.Ct. 441, 52 L.Ed. 714 (1908), that the Eleventh Amendment does not mean precisely what it says.
The scope of Ex parte Young was narrowed, the majority opinion explains, by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Idaho v. Coeur d’Alene Tribe, 521 U.S. 261, 117 S.Ct. 2028, 138 L.Ed.2d 438 (1997). That may be so, but I am not entirely convinced. Whether the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s claim of entitlement to quiet enjoyment of the submerged lands of Lake Coeur d’Alene is, for purposes of Eleventh Amendment constitutional doctrine, the essential equivalent of the Mac-Donalds’ claim to the portion of 7th Street next to their home, is a question that needs more thorough vetting than it has been given on this appeal. Indeed, the district court did not address the question in its opinion, and as the majority here observes, the question was not discussed in the parties’ briefs.
I am content, therefore, to rest my view that the judgment below should be affirmed solely on my brothers’ reasoning that the district court properly invoked the abstention doctrine.