Cite as: 527 U. S. 706 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
together. See 1 F. Pollock & F. Maitland, History of English Law 518 (2d ed. 1909), quoted in Nevada v. Hall, 440 U. S., at 415, n. 6 (" '[The King] can not be compelled to answer in his own court, but this is true of every petty lord of every petty manor' "); accord, 3 W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law 465 (3d ed. 1927) ("[N]o feudal lord could be sued in his own court"). It is doubtful whether the King was regarded, in any meaningful sense, as the font of the traditions and customs which formed the substance of the common law, yet he could not be sued on a common-law claim in his own courts. And it strains credibility to imagine that the King could have been sued in his own court on, say, a French cause of action.
In light of the ratification debates and the history of the Eleventh Amendment, there is no reason to believe the Founders intended the Constitution to preserve a more restricted immunity in the United States. On the contrary, Congress' refusal to modify the text of the Eleventh Amendment to create an exception to sovereign immunity for cases arising under treaties, see supra, at 721, suggests the States' sovereign immunity was understood to extend beyond state-law causes of action. And surely the dissent does not believe that sovereign immunity poses no bar to a state-law suit against the United States in federal court, or that the Federal Tort Claims Act effected a contraction, rather than an expansion, of the United States' amenability to suit.
2
There are isolated statements in some of our cases suggesting that the Eleventh Amendment is inapplicable in state courts. See Hilton v. South Carolina Public Railways Comm'n, 502 U. S. 197, 204-205 (1991); Will v. Michigan Dept. of State Police, 491 U. S. 58, 63 (1989); Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S., at 239-240, n. 2; Maine v. Thiboutot, 448 U. S. 1, 9, n. 7 (1980); Hall, supra, at 418- 421. This, of course, is a truism as to the literal terms of
735
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