The first amendment to the United States Constitution following the Bill of Rights is the Eleventh Amendment, which reads: “The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.” This Amendment was ratified in 1795 in response to the Supreme Court decision in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793). The case came from the Revolutionary War, when Captain Robert Farquhar, a resident of South Carolina, supplied goods to the state of Georgia for which Georgia did not fully pay. Farquhar died in 1784. In 1792, Alexander Chisholm, the executor of Farquhar’s estate, filed suit against Georgia in the US Supreme Court over payment that Georgia still owed for the goods. US Attorney General Edmund Randolph argued the case for Chisholm, but government officials in Georgia claimed sovereign immunity and refused to appear. The Court found by a 4-1 margin that the grant of federal jurisdiction over suits “between a State and Citizens of another State” in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution granted federal courts the power to hear cases between private citizens and States, and that States did not enjoy sovereign immunity in such cases. The Eleventh Amendment was written mostly for the purpose of overturning the Chisholm decision, which stands as one of only a handful of court rulings to be overturned by a Constitutional amendment. The ruling in Hollingsworth v. Virginia (1798) held that every pending action under Chisholm had to be dismissed due to the ratification of the Eleventh Amendment. The only remaining way at the time for a state to be sued by non-residents of the state was for that state to consent to the suit. Since then, three Supreme Court cases have made further exceptions to a state’s sovereign immunity. Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer (1976) held that Congress may abrogate the sovereign immunity of a state pursuant to a valid exercise of the Fourteenth Amendment, Central Virginia Community College v. Katz (2006) held that Congress may do the same in bankruptcy cases through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4, and Lapides v. Board of Regents of University System of Georgia (2002) held that a state waives the Eleventh Amendment if it invokes a federal court’s removal jurisdiction, which is the right of a defendant to move a lawsuit filed in state court to the federal district court for that location. To make a case against the Eleventh Amendment, we will first note the problems with its interpretation, then we will examine the failings of the doctrine of sovereign immunity in general, as refuting this doctrine defeats the Eleventh Amendment a fortiori. Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com
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Source: Reece Liberty.Me – A Case Against the Eleventh Amendment