Lane v. Pe–a, 518 U.S. 187, 26 (1996)

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212

LANE v. PENA

Stevens, J., dissenting

The prompt congressional reaction to our decision in Atascadero illustrates the lack of wisdom of the Court's rigid approach to waivers of sovereign immunity.15 It was true in

that case, as it is in this, that Congress could have drafted a clearer statement of its intent. Our task, however, is not to educate busy legislators in the niceties and details of scholarly draftsmanship, but rather to do our best to determine what message they intended to convey. When judge-made rules require Congress to use its valuable time enacting and reenacting provisions whose original intent was clear to all but the most skeptical and hostile reader, those rules should be discarded.

I respectfully dissent.

15 The Court decided Atascadero in 1985. Congress passed legislation to override the decision in 1986. See Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1986, 100 Stat. 1845, 42 U. S. C. § 2000d-7; see also ante, at 198. In recent years Congress has enacted numerous pieces of legislation designed to override statutory opinions of this Court. See Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U. S. 244, 250-251 (1994) (listing eight decisions legislatively overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1991). Additional examples are cited in Eskridge, Overriding Supreme Court Statutory Interpretation Decisions, 101 Yale L. J. 331, App. I (1991).

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