Result
The Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, struck down this abrogation as unconstitutional, and further held that the doctrine of Ex parte Young does not apply in this situation.
The Court began by repudiating the precedential value of Union Gas, noting that there was no single majority rationale, and characterizing it as a major departure from the 19th century case of Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U.S. 1 (1890), which had established the modern doctrine of sovereign immunity. The Court suggested that allowing Congress to abrogate sovereign immunity improperly expanded the jurisdiction of the federal courts beyond what Article Three of the U.S. Constitution permitted. The Eleventh Amendment, it contended, had further protected the states' sovereign immunity; the Fourteenth Amendment placed limitations on the Eleventh Amendment, but only with respect to the rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court also found that the doctrine of Ex parte Young did not apply, invoking the rationale of an earlier case, Schweiker v. Chilicky, 487 U.S. 412 (1988), for the proposition that where Congress had provided a remedial scheme, the Courts would not imply the existence of additional remedies.
Read more about this topic: Seminole Tribe Of Florida V. Florida
Famous quotes containing the word result:
“The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate”
—Christopher Hampton (b. 1946)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)