OCTOBER TERM, 1997
Syllabus
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the seventh circuit
No. 97-461. Argued April 20, 1998—Decided June 22, 1998
Respondent Schacht filed a state-court suit against the defendants (petitioners here), the Wisconsin Department of Corrections and several of its employees, both in their "personal" and in their "official" capacities, alleging that his dismissal from his prison guard position violated the Federal Constitution and federal civil rights laws. The defendants removed the case to federal court and then filed an answer raising the "defense" that the Eleventh Amendment doctrine of sovereign immunity barred the claims against the Department and its employees in their official capacity. The District Court granted the individual defendants summary judgment on the "personal capacity" claims and dismissed the claims against the Department and the individual defendants in their "official capacity." On appeal, Schacht challenged only the disposition of the "personal capacity" claims, but the Seventh Circuit determined that the removal had been improper because the presence of even one claim subject to an Eleventh Amendment bar deprives the federal courts of removal jurisdiction over the entire case.
Held: The presence in an otherwise removable case of a claim barred by the Eleventh Amendment does not destroy removal jurisdiction that would otherwise exist. A federal court can proceed to hear the remaining claims, and the District Court did not err in doing so in this case. Pp. 386-393.
(a) Title 28 U. S. C. § 1441(a), which allows a defendant to remove "any civil action brought in a State court of which the [federal] district courts . . . have original jurisdiction," obviously permits the removal of a case containing only claims that "arise under" federal law, since federal courts have original jurisdiction over such claims, see § 1331. There are several parts to respondent's argument that removal jurisdiction is destroyed if one of those federal claims is subject to an Eleventh Amendment bar. First, the argument distinguishes cases with both federal-law and state-law claims from cases with federal-law claims that include one or more Eleventh Amendment claims. In the former cases the state-law claims fall within the federal courts' supplemental jurisdiction. In the latter cases the comparable claims are ones that the Eleventh Amendment prohibits the federal courts from deciding.
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