Cite as: 527 U. S. 666 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
expressing unequivocally its intention that if the State takes certain action it shall be deemed to have waived that immunity. In the latter situation, the most that can be said with certainty is that the State has been put on notice that Congress intends to subject it to suits brought by individuals. That is very far from concluding that the State made an "altogether voluntary" decision to waive its immunity. Beers, 20 How., at 529.3
Indeed, Parden-style waivers are simply unheard of in the context of other constitutionally protected privileges. As we said in Edelman, "[c]onstructive consent is not a doctrine commonly associated with the surrender of constitutional rights." 415 U. S., at 673. For example, imagine if Congress amended the securities laws to provide with unmistakable clarity that anyone committing fraud in connection with
3 In an attempt to cast doubt on our characterization of Parden as a groundbreaking case, Justice Breyer points to three earlier decisions which allegedly demonstrate that Parden worked no major change. These cases, however, have only the most tenuous relation to Parden's actual holding—as one might suspect from the dissent's soft-pedaled description of them as "roughly comparable" and involving (in quotation marks) " 'waivers.' " Post, at 696. The first two, United States v. California, 297 U. S. 175 (1936), and California v. Taylor, 353 U. S. 553 (1957), involved neither state immunity from suit nor waiver, but the entirely different question whether substantive provisions of Commerce Clause legislation applied to the States. The former concerned a suit brought against a State by the United States (a situation in which state sovereign immunity does not exist, see United States v. Texas, 143 U. S. 621 (1892)), and the latter expressly acknowledged that "the Eleventh Amendment" was "not before us," 353 U. S., at 568, n. 16. The last case, Gardner v. New Jersey, 329 U. S. 565 (1947), which held that a bankruptcy court can entertain a trustee's objections to a claim filed by a State, stands for the unremarkable proposition that a State waives its sovereign immunity by voluntarily invoking the jurisdiction of the federal courts. See supra, at 675-676. In sum, none of these cases laid any foundation for Parden— whose author was quite correct in acknowledging that it "presented a question of first impression," Employees of Dept. of Public Health and Welfare of Mo. v. Department of Public Health and Welfare of Mo., 411 U. S. 279, 299 (1973) (Brennan, J., dissenting).
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