Cite as: 517 U. S. 44 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
as such, as in this case? Hamilton's discussion does not seem to cover this (quite possibly because, as a good political polemicist, he did not wish to raise it). If in fact it is fair to say that Hamilton does not cover this situation, then the Court cannot claim him as authority for the preservation of state sovereignty and consequent immunity. If, however, on what I think is an implausible reading, one were to try to shoehorn this situation into Hamilton's category (c) (on the theory that concurrent authority is impossible after passage of the congressional legislation), then any claim of sovereignty and consequent immunity is gone entirely.
In sum, either the majority reads Hamilton as I do, to say nothing about sovereignty or immunity in such a case, or it will have to read him to say something about it that bars any state immunity claim. That is the dilemma of the majority's reliance on Hamilton's The Federalist No. 81, with its reference to No. 32. Either way, he is no authority for the Court's position.
Thus, the Court's attempt to convert isolated statements by the Framers into answers to questions not before them is fundamentally misguided.42 The Court's difficulty is far more fundamental, however, than inconsistency with a particular quotation, for the Court's position runs afoul of the general theory of sovereignty that gave shape to the Framers' enterprise. An enquiry into the development of that concept demonstrates that American political thought had so revolutionized the concept of sovereignty itself that calling
42 See The Federalist No. 82, p. 553 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton) (disclaiming any intent to answer all the "questions of intricacy and nicety" arising in a judicial system that must accommodate "the total or partial incorporation of a number of distinct sovereignties"); S. Elkins & E. McKitrick, The Age of Federalism 64 (1993) (suggesting that "[t]he amount of attention and discussion given to the judiciary in the Constitutional Convention was only a fraction of that devoted to the executive and legislative branches," and that the Framers deliberately left many questions open for later resolution).
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