Cite as: 527 U. S. 706 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
There is language in Hilton which gives some support to the position of petitioners here but our decision did not squarely address, much less resolve, the question of Congress' power to abrogate States' immunity from suit in their own courts. The respondent in Hilton, the South Carolina Public Railways Commission, neither contested Congress' constitutional authority to subject it to suits for money damages nor raised sovereign immunity as an affirmative defense. See Brief for Respondent in No. 90-848, O. T. 1991, pp. 7, n. 14, 21. Nor was the State's litigation strategy surprising. Hilton was litigated and decided in the wake of Union Gas, and before this Court's decisions in New York, Printz, and Seminole Tribe. At that time it may have appeared to the State that Congress' power to abrogate its immunity from suit in any court was not limited by the Constitution at all, so long as Congress made its intent sufficiently clear.
Furthermore, our decision in Parden was based on concepts of waiver and consent. Although later decisions have undermined the basis of Parden's reasoning, see, e. g., Welch v. Texas Dept. of Highways and Public Transp., 483 U. S. 468, 476-478 (1987) (recognizing that Parden erred in finding a clear congressional intent to subject the States to suit); College Savings Bank, ante, at 680 (overruling Parden's theory of constructive waiver), we have not questioned the general proposition that a State may waive its sovereign immunity and consent to suit, see Seminole Tribe, 517 U. S., at 65.
Hilton, then, must be read in light of the doctrinal basis of Parden, the issues presented and argued by the parties, and the substantial reliance interests drawn into question by the litigation. When so read, we believe the decision is best understood not as recognizing a congressional power to subject nonconsenting States to private suits in their own courts, nor even as endorsing the constructive waiver theory of Parden, but as simply adhering, as a matter of stare decisis and presumed historical fact, to the narrow proposition
737
Page: Index Previous 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007