Court Opinion

ID: 9430231
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:17.298018+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:23.794339
License: Public Domain

Justice Marshall,
with whom Justice Brennan and Justice Stevens join, dissenting.
I concur in Justice Brennan’s and Justice Blackmun’s dissents. I contribute to this proliferation of opinions only to add a few words as to why, even under the view of the Eleventh Amendment accepted by the majority in Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234 (1985), the majority reaches an incorrect result in this case.
M
Justice Brennan’s opinion cogently explains how the decision of the majority today repudiates Quern v. Jordan, 440 U. S. 332 (1979). The Court in that case did not approve notice relief as a “mere case-management device,” ante, at 71, nor does the majority suggest how informing class members of state administrative procedures serves a case-management function in federal-court litigation. Rather, the Quern Court, explicitly posing the question whether “the modified notice contemplated by the Seventh Circuit constitute^] permissible prospective relief or a ‘retroactive award which requires the payment of funds from the state treasury,’ ” concluded that “this relief falls on the Ex parte Young side of the Eleventh Amendment line rather than on the Edelman side.” Quern, supra, at 346-347.
H HH
In abandoning the result it reached six years ago, the majority misapplies its own Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence. The majority states that there are two kinds of remedies that can be sought against a state officer: prospective relief “designed to end a continuing violation of federal law,” *80and retrospective relief serving mere “compensatory or deterrence interests.” Ante, at 68. Only in the former class of relief, it concludes, do the federal interests involved outweigh the Eleventh Amendment interests implicated by a suit against a state officer in his official capacity.* “Prospective” and “retrospective” labels, however, should be irrelevant to analysis of this case. The notice relief at issue here imposes no significant costs on the State, creates no direct liabilities against the State, and respects the institutions of state government. See Quern, supra, at 347-348. This Court has never held that the Eleventh Amendment poses any bar to such relief. Indeed, notice of the availability of possible relief through existing state administrative remedies, where the state agency and state courts would be the sole arbiters of what relief would be granted, assists in the vindication of state law by informing class members that they may have causes of action under that law. In the Eleventh Amendment balance set up by the majority opinion, it is thus hard to see what weight, if any, exists on the State’s side of the scale, and why that weight should overcome the interest in vindicating federal law.
*81I would hold that whether the Eleventh Amendment was intended simply to provide that a State cannot be sued in federal court where the basis of jurisdiction is that the plaintiff is a citizen of another State or an alien (as I believe), or was intended to constitutionalize a much broader principle of state sovereign immunity (as the majority believes), there is simply nothing offensive to that Amendment in an order that the State notify class members of the possibility that they may be entitled to relief through the state administrative process. Because that order neither imposes significant costs on the State nor creates any direct liabilities against it, the Quern Court properly placed it “on the Ex parte Young side of the Eleventh Amendment line.” 440 U. S., at 347.

The distinction is hardly so neat as the majority implies. The majority cites Milliken v. Bradley, 433 U. S. 267 (1977), as exemplifying permissible injunctive relief. Ante, at 68. That case involved a continuing federal duty to remedy the effects of past de jure segregation; the Court upheld against Eleventh Amendment attack an order that state officials pay costs attributable to a program “designed... to restore the schoolchildren of Detroit to the position they would have enjoyed absent constitutional violations by state and local officials,” 433 U. S., at 281, characterizing the relief both as “prospectiv[e]” and as “compensatory,” id., at 290. Yet petitioners here note that Congress has imposed on state agencies a continuing federal duty to “take all necessary steps to correct any . . . underpayment of aid under the State plan.” 42 U. S. C. § 602(a)(22); see also 45 CFR § 205.10(a) (1984). The relief in this case too might therefore be described as related to a continuing federal duty, “part of a plan that operates prospectively to bring about the delayed benefits of a [constitutionally administered program].” Milliken, supra, at 290 (emphasis in original).