678
Opinion of the Court
411 U. S., at 285, unlike the provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act in question that applied to a broad class of state employees. We also distinguished the railroad in Parden on the ground that it was "operated for profit" "in the area where private persons and corporations normally ran the enterprise." 411 U. S., at 284. Justice Marshall, joined by Justice Stewart, went even further, concluding that although, in their view, Congress had clearly purported to subject the States to suits by individuals in federal courts, it lacked the constitutional authority to do so. Id., at 287, 289-290 (opinion concurring in result).
The next year, we observed (in dictum) that there is "no place" for the doctrine of constructive waiver in our sovereign-immunity jurisprudence, and we emphasized that we would "find waiver only where stated by the most express language or by such overwhelming implications from the text as [will] leave no room for any other reasonable construction." Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U. S. 651, 673 (1974) (internal quotation marks omitted). Several Terms later, in Welch v. Texas Dept. of Highways and Public Transp., 483 U. S. 468 (1987), although we expressly avoided addressing the constitutionality of Congress's conditioning a State's engaging in Commerce Clause activity upon the State's waiver of sovereign immunity, we said there was "no doubt that Parden's discussion of congressional intent to negate Eleventh Amendment immunity is no longer good law," and overruled Parden "to the extent [it] is inconsistent with the requirement that an abrogation of Eleventh Amendment immunity by Congress must be expressed in unmistakably clear language," 483 U. S., at 478, and n. 8.2
2 In response to this string of cases criticizing or narrowing the holding of Parden, Justice Breyer holds up three post-Parden cases as decisions that "support[ed]" Parden, post, at 696, or at least "carefully avoided calling [it] into question," post, at 698. His perception of "support" in Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234 (1985), rests upon nothing more substantial than the fact that the case "suggest[ed] that a waiver
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