Cite as: 527 U. S. 666 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
engaging in commerce between . . . the several States," 45 U. S. C. § 51 (1940 ed.). We further held that Alabama had waived its immunity from FELA suit even though Alabama law expressly disavowed any such waiver:
"By enacting the [FELA] . . . Congress conditioned the right to operate a railroad in interstate commerce upon amenability to suit in federal court as provided by the Act; by thereafter operating a railroad in interstate commerce, Alabama must be taken to have accepted that condition and thus to have consented to suit." 377 U. S., at 192.
The four dissenting Justices in Parden refused to infer a waiver because Congress had not "expressly declared" that a State operating in commerce would be subject to liability, but they went on to acknowledge—in a concession that, strictly speaking, was not necessary to their analysis—that Congress possessed the power to effect such a waiver of the State's constitutionally protected immunity so long as it did so with clarity. Id., at 198-200 (opinion of White, J.).
Only nine years later, in Employees of Dept. of Public Health and Welfare of Mo. v. Department of Public Health and Welfare of Mo., 411 U. S. 279 (1973), we began to retreat from Parden. That case held—in an opinion written by one of the Parden dissenters over the solitary dissent of Parden's author—that the State of Missouri was immune from a suit brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act by employees of its state health facilities. Although the statute specifically covered the state hospitals in question, see 29 U. S. C. § 203(d) (1964 ed.), and such coverage was unquestionably enforceable in federal court by the United States, 411 U. S., at 285-286, we did not think that the statute expressed with clarity Congress's intention to supersede the States' immunity from suits brought by individuals. We "put to one side" the Parden case, which we characterized as involving "dramatic circumstances" and "a rather isolated state activity,"
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