316
Souter, J., dissenting
a state forum should have some bearing on the applicability of Ex parte Young is thus as much at odds with precedent as with basic jurisdictional principles.
There is one more strike against the principal opinion's assumption that there is some significance in the availability of a state forum. The day the Court decided Young, it also decided General Oil Co. v. Crain, 209 U. S. 211 (1908). General Oil reviewed an order of the Supreme Court of Tennessee dismissing a corporation's suit against a state officer for relief from what it claimed was his violation of the National Constitution. The state court had said it lacked jurisdiction in the matter after construing the suit as one against the State, which was immune as sovereign. This Court held the dismissal to be reversible error,13 ruling as a matter of federal law that the suit could not have been construed as being against the State. See id., at 226-228. State law conferring immunity on its officers could not, in other words, constitutionally excuse a state court of general jurisdiction from an obligation to hear a suit brought to enjoin a state official's action as exceeding his authority because unconstitutional.14
afford against him, could his principal be joined in suit." Osborn, 9 Wheat., at 843. And while the Court recognized the equitable remedy provided relief "more beneficial and complete than the law can give," id., at 845, the Court did not suggest that a remedy in state court was absent, or that any significance attached to the availability of a state forum.
13 The judgment was not actually reversed because the Court reached the previously unreviewed challenge to the official's action and found it meritless. See General Oil Co. v. Crain, 209 U. S., at 231.
14 General Oil's application is not limited to those cases in which a remedy in federal court is unavailable, notwithstanding the observation that state relief was required given the Eleventh Amendment bar to suit in federal court, General Oil Co. v. Crain, 209 U. S., at 226, since Young ensured that the federal courts would be open for injunctive claims just like those at issue in General Oil. See Fallon, The Ideologies of Federal Courts Law, 74 Va. L. Rev. 1141, 1209, n. 312 (1988) (sentences surrounding the references in General Oil to an unavailable federal forum make clear that "the crucial distinction determining the obligations of the state courts is not one involving the availability or nonavailability of federal judicial relief; it is, rather, 'between valid and invalid state laws, as determining'
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