Court Opinion

ID: 9430230
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:17.295509+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:23.792331
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
with whpm Justice Marshall, Justice Blackmun, and Justice Stevens join, dissenting.
Last Term, in my dissent in Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 257 (1985), I explained at length my view that the Court’s Eleventh Amendment doctrine “lacks a textual anchor [in the Constitution], a firm historical foundation, or a clear rationale.” Today’s decision demonstrates that the absence of a stable analytical structure underlying the Court’s Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence produces inconsistent decisions.
In Quern v. Jordan, 440 U. S. 332 (1979), the State of Illinois contended that the notice relief ordered by the Court of Appeals, which was identical in all significant respects to *75that requested in the instant case,1 offended the Eleventh Amendment because “giving the proposed notice [would] lead inexorably to the payment of state funds for retroactive benefits and therefore it, in effect, amounts to a monetary award.” Id., at 347. Justice Rehnquist, writing for the Court, rejected that argument:
“[T]he chain of causation which petitioner seeks to establish is by no means unbroken; it contains numerous missing links, which can be supplied, if at all, only by the State and members of the plaintiff class and not by a federal court. The notice approved by the Court of Appeals simply apprises plaintiff class members of the existence of whatever administrative procedures may already be available under state law by which they may receive a determination of eligibility for past benefits. . . . The mere sending of that notice does not trigger the state administrative machinery. Whether a recipient of notice decides to take advantage of those available state procedures is left completely to the discretion of that particular class member; the federal court plays no role in that decision. And whether or not the class member will receive retroactive benefits rests entirely with the *76State, its agencies, courts, and legislature, not with the federal court.” Id., at 347-348.
In the present case, the Court turns around and accepts the argument made by the State of Illinois in Quern with respect to Green’s request for declaratory relief. Justice Rehnquist states that declaratory relief is barred by the Eleventh Amendment because
"the award of a declaratory judgment in this situation would be useful in resolving the dispute over the past lawfulness of respondent’s action only if it might be offered in state-court proceedings as res judicata on the issue of liability, leaving to the state courts only a form of accounting proceeding whereby damages or restitution would be computed. But the issuance of a declaratory judgment in these circumstances would have much the same effect as a full-fledged award of damages or restitution by the federal court, the latter kinds of relief being . . . prohibited by the Eleventh Amendment.” Ante, at 73.
What the Court ignores is that the declaration by the District Court in the Quern litigation that Illinois officials had violated federal law, combined with the notice relief we sanctioned, would have yielded the same result.2 The Court fails to explain adequately why declaratory relief should be analyzed differently than notice relief was in Quern, since use of the declaratory judgment in the State’s courts is also left completely to the discretion of individual notice recipients and the award of retroactive benefits “rests entirely with the State, its agencies, courts, and legislature, not with the federal court.” Quern, supra, at 348.
*77By way of explication, the Court retreats to the position that federal courts may grant relief prospectively, that is, against ongoing and future violations of federal law, but not retroactively, that is, against past violations of federal law. Basically what the Court is doing, as it admits in this case, is balancing the Eleventh Amendment and the Supremacy Clause. Ante, at 68. If relief is sought against continuing violations, the Court finds that the Supremacy Clause outweighs the Eleventh Amendment; but if relief is requested against past violations, the Court determines that the Eleventh Amendment outweighs the Supremacy Clause. The Court cites no constitutional authority for this balancing test and has not offered, and I suspect cannot offer, a satisfactory analytical foundation for it.
Furthermore, I strenuously disagree with the Court’s suggestion that the balance it has struck sufficiently protects the supremacy of federal law. It may be true that the availability of prospective relief of the sort awarded in Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123 (1908), gives, as the Court puts it, some “life” to the Supremacy Clause. Ante, at 68. That this rule saves the Clause from being completely moribund does not, however, alter the reality that it is insufficient to ensure that federal law is paramount. From this day forward, at least with regard to welfare programs, States may refuse to follow federal law with impunity, secure in the knowledge that all they need do to immunize themselves from accountability in federal courts is to conform their policies to federal law on the eve of judgment in a suit brought to secure “prospective” in-junctive relief. During the period of noncompliance, States save money by not paying benefits according to the criteria established by federal law,3 while needy individuals desig*78nated by Congress as the beneficiaries of welfare programs are cheated of their federal rights. Once again, the Court’s doctrine “require[s] the federal courts to protect States that violate federal law from the legal consequences of their conduct.” Atascadero, 473 U. S., at 258. Surely the Supremacy Clause requires a different result.
The foregoing reveals the fundamental incoherence of the Court’s Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence. Before the Court can develop a coherent Eleventh Amendment doctrine, I believe that it must reassess a long line of our precedents, beginning with Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U. S. 1 (1890), and culminating in today’s decision, that have perpetuated an erroneous interpretation of the Eleventh Amendment. As I demonstrated in Atascadero, supra, the Court’s constitutional doctrine of the sovereign immunity of States rests on a mistaken historical premise. Because I treated the subject exhaustively in that case, I will only restate my conclusions here. Recent scholarship indicates that the Framers never intended to constitutionalize the doctrine of state sovereign immunity; consequently the Eleventh Amendment was not an effort to reestablish, after Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall. 419 (1793), a limitation on federal judicial power contained in Article III. Nor, given the limited terms and context in which the Eleventh Amendment was drafted, could the Amendment’s narrow and technical language be understood to have instituted a broad new limitation on the federal judicial power in cases “arising under” federal law whenever an individual attempts to sue a State. Atascadero, 473 U. S., at 258-259. Rather, as the historical records and the language of the Constitution reveal, the Amendment was intended simply to remove federal-court jurisdiction over suits against a State where the basis for jurisdiction was that the plaintiff was a citizen of another State or an alien — suits which result in the abrogation of the state law of sovereign immunity in state-law causes of action. Id., at 259-280.
*79Because the disputes in the instant case are between citizens and their own State and because a federal question is the source of federal-court jurisdiction, the Eleventh Amendment, properly construed, is no bar to petitioners’ suits.
I respectfully dissent.

 Green asked the District Court to order that notices be sent out to other AFDC recipients advising them of the outcome of the litigation, i. e., of the declaratory judgment and telling them that state administrative proceedings might be available to them to obtain retroactive benefits. App. 132. Similarly, the notice approved in Quern v. Jordan, 440 U. S., at 349, “inform[ed] class members that their federal suit [was] at an end, that the federal court [could] provide them with no further relief, and that there [were] existing state administrative procedures which they may wish to pursue.” The class members were ‘“given no more . . . than what they would have gathered by sitting in the courtroom.’ ” Ibid., quoting Jordan v. Trainor, 563 F. 2d 873, 877-878 (CA7 1977). And, of course, what class members would have gathered by sitting in the courtroom was the substantive outcome of the litigation — a declaration that Illinois officials had violated federal law.

 It is not enough to distinguish the cases to observe that the notice relief in Quern, was “ancillary” to a prospective injunction because the “prospective” injunction had been moot for three years before the Court of Appeals fashioned the notice relief and for five years before this Court approved it — Congress abolished the federal program at issue in Quern in 1974.

 AFDC is a matching benefits program. States pay up to 60 percent of their benefit payments, the Federal Government pays the remainder. House Committee on Ways and Means, Background Material and Data on Programs within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, 98th Cong., 2d Sess., 292 (Comm. Print 1984).