Cite as: 517 U. S. 44 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
more, permits a State to plead sovereign immunity to bar the exercise of federal-question jurisdiction. See id., at 9. Although the Court invoked a principle of sovereign immunity to cure what it took to be the Eleventh Amendment's anomaly of barring only those state suits brought by noncitizen plaintiffs, the Hans Court had no occasion to consider whether Congress could abrogate that background immunity by statute. Indeed (except in the special circumstance of Congress's power to enforce the Civil War Amendments), this question never came before our Court until Union Gas, and any intimations of an answer in prior cases were mere dicta. In Union Gas the Court held that the immunity recognized in Hans had no constitutional status and was subject to congressional abrogation. Today the Court overrules Union Gas and holds just the opposite. In deciding how to choose between these two positions, the place to begin is with Hans's holding that a principle of sovereign immunity derived from the common law insulates a State from federal-question jurisdiction at the suit of its own citizen. A critical examination of that case will show that it was wrongly decided, as virtually every recent commentator has concluded.14 It follows that the Court's further step today of constitutionalizing Hans's rule against abrogation by Congress compounds and immensely magnifies the century-old mistake of Hans itself and takes its place with other historic examples of textually untethered elevations of judicially derived rules to the status of inviolable constitutional law.
A
The Louisiana plaintiff in Hans held bonds issued by that State, which, like virtually all of the Southern States, had issued them in substantial amounts during the Reconstruction era to finance public improvements aimed at stimulating
14 Professor Jackson has noted the "remarkabl[e] consisten[cy]" of the scholarship on this point, Jackson, 98 Yale L. J., at 44, n. 179. See also n. 8, supra.
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