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Souter, J., dissenting
struction, and Treasurer, which resulted in an order obligating the State of Michigan to pay money from its treasury to fund an education plan. The relief requested (and obtained) by the plaintiffs effectively ran against the State: state moneys were to be removed from the state treasury, and they were to be spent to fund a remedial education program that it would be the State's obligation to implement. To take another example, Quern v. Jordan involved a court order requiring state officials to notify welfare beneficiaries of the availability of past benefits. Once again, the defendants were state officials, but it was the obligation of the State that was really at issue: the notices would be sent from the state welfare agency, to be returned to the state agency, and the state agency would pay for the notices and any ensuing awards of benefits. Indeed, in the years since Young was decided, the Court has recognized only one limitation on the scope of its doctrine: under Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U. S. 651 (1974), Young permits prospective relief only and may not be applied to authorize suits for retrospective monetary relief.
It should be no cause for surprise that Young itself appeared when it did in the national law. It followed as a matter of course after the Hans Court's broad recognition of immunity in federal-question cases, simply because "[r]eme-dies designed to end a continuing violation of federal law are necessary to vindicate the federal interest in assuring the supremacy of that law." Green v. Mansour, 474 U. S. 64, 68 (1985). Young provided, as it does today, a sensible way to reconcile the Court's expansive view of immunity expressed in Hans with the principles embodied in the Supremacy Clause and Article III.
If Young may be seen as merely the natural consequence of Hans, it is equally unsurprising as an event in the longer history of sovereign immunity doctrine, for the rule we speak of under the name of Young is so far inherent in the jurisdictional limitation imposed by sovereign immunity as to have been recognized since the Middle Ages. For that
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