Cite as: 517 U. S. 44 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
shall's description of the National and State Governments as "each sovereign, with respect to the objects committed to it, and neither sovereign with respect to the objects committed to the other." McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 410 (1819).
Given this metamorphosis of the idea of sovereignty in the years leading up to 1789, the question whether the old immunity doctrine might have been received as something suitable for the new world of federal-question jurisdiction is a crucial one.48 The answer is that sovereign immunity as it would have been known to the Framers before ratification thereafter became inapplicable as a matter of logic in a federal suit raising a federal question. The old doctrine, after all, barred the involuntary subjection of a sovereign to the system of justice and law of which it was itself the font, since to do otherwise would have struck the common-law mind from the Middle Ages onward as both impractical and absurd. See, e. g., Kawananakoa v. Polyblank, 205 U. S. 349, 353 (1907) (Holmes, J.) ("A sovereign is exempt from suit . . . on the logical and practical ground that there can be no legal right as against the authority that makes the law on which the right depends").49 But the ratification demonstrated
48 See, e. g., Amar, supra, at 1436 ("By thus relocating true sovereignty in the People themselves . . . Americans domesticated government power and decisively repudiated British notions of 'sovereign' governmental omnipotence" (footnote omitted)). That this repudiation extended to traditional principles of sovereign immunity is clear from Justice Wilson's opinion in Chisholm, in which he blasted "the haughty notions of state independence, state sovereignty and state supremacy" as allowing "the state [to] assum[e] a supercilious pre-eminence above the people who have formed it." 2 Dall., at 461.
49 See also Hobbes, supra, at 130 ("The sovereign of a Commonwealth, be it an assembly or one man, is not subject to the civil laws. . . . For he is free that can be free when he will: nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himself, because he that can bind can release; and therefore he that is bound to himself only is not bound"); Bodin, supra, at 28-29 ("One may be subject to laws made by another, but it is impossible to bind oneself in any matter which is the subject of one's own free exercise of
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