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tor. It will be a rare case indeed where the state treasury foots the bill for an entity's wrongs but fails to exercise a healthy degree of oversight over that entity. But the control test goes further than the Court's single factor in assuring state governments the critical flexibility in internal governance that is essential to sovereign authority. See Note, 92 Colum. L. Rev., at 1246-1252 (describing structural innovations among state governments).
The Court dismisses consideration of control altogether, ante, at 47-48, noting that States wield ultimate power over cities and counties, units that have never been accorded Eleventh Amendment immunity. See Lincoln County v. Luning, 133 U. S. 529, 530 (1890). This criticism, based on a supposed line-drawing problem, is off the mark. That "political subdivisions exist solely at the whim and behest of their State," Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corp. v. Feeney, 495 U. S., at 313 (Brennan, J., concurring), does not mean that state governments actually exercise sufficient oversight to trigger Eleventh Amendment immunity under a control-centered formulation. The inquiry should turn on real, immediate control and oversight, rather than on the potentiality of a State taking action to seize the reins. Virtually every enterprise, municipal or private, flourishes in some sense at the behest of the State. But we have never found the Eleventh Amendment's protections to hinge on this sort of abstraction. The control-centered formulation necessarily looks to the structure and function of state law. If the State delegates control and oversight of an entity to municipalities under state law, the requisite state-level control is lacking, and the Eleventh Amendment does not shield the entity from suit in federal court.
III
Turning to the instant case, I believe that sufficient indicia of control exist to support a finding of immunity for the Port Authority, and hence, for the PATH. New Jersey and New
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