Cite as: 527 U. S. 666 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
of the Trademark Act of 1946 (Lanham Act) for false and misleading advertising, 60 Stat. 441, 15 U. S. C. § 1125(a). The question presented in this case is whether that provision is effective to permit suit against a State for its alleged misrepresentation of its own product—either because the TRCA effects a constitutionally permissible abrogation of state sovereign immunity, or because the TRCA operates as an invitation to waiver of such immunity which is automatically accepted by a State's engaging in the activities regulated by the Lanham Act.
I
In Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall. 419 (1793), we asserted jurisdiction over an action in assumpsit brought by a South Carolina citizen against the State of Georgia. In so doing, we reasoned that Georgia's sovereign immunity was qualified by the general jurisdictional provisions of Article III, and, most specifically, by the provision extending the federal judicial power to controversies "between a State and Citizens of another State." U. S. Const., Art. III, § 2, cl. 1. The "shock of surprise" created by this decision, Principality of Monaco v. Mississippi, 292 U. S. 313, 325 (1934), prompted the immediate adoption of the Eleventh Amendment, which provides:
"The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."
Though its precise terms bar only federal jurisdiction over suits brought against one State by citizens of another State or foreign state, we have long recognized that the Eleventh Amendment accomplished much more: It repudiated the central premise of Chisholm that the jurisdictional heads of Article III superseded the sovereign immunity that the States possessed before entering the Union. This has been our understanding of the Amendment since the landmark
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