Cite as: 527 U. S. 706 (1999)
Souter, J., dissenting
which she may permit herself to be sued in her own Courts." Id., at 452. Second, he commented that there was no need to require the plaintiff to proceed by way of petition:
"When sovereigns are sued in their own Courts, such a method may have been established as the most respectful form of demand; but we are not now in a State-Court; and if sovereignty be an exemption from suit in any other than the sovereign's own Courts, it follows that when a State, by adopting the Constitution, has agreed to be amenable to the judicial power of the United States, she has, in that respect, given up her right of sovereignty." Ibid.
It is worth noting that for Justice Blair, the petition brought in state court was properly called a suit. This reflects the contemporary practice of his native Virginia, where, as we have seen, supra, at 769, suits as of right against the State were authorized by statute. Justice Blair called sovereignty "an exemption from suit in any other than the sovereign's own Courts" because he assumed that, in its own courts, a sovereign will naturally permit itself to be sued as of right.
Justice Iredell was the only Member of the Court to hold that the suit could not lie; but if his discussion was far-reaching, his reasoning was cautious. Its core was that the Court could not assume a waiver of the State's common law sovereign immunity where Congress had not expressly passed such a waiver. See 2 Dall., at 449 (dissenting opinion). Although Justice Iredell added, in what he clearly identified as dictum, that he was "strongly against" any construction of the Constitution "which will admit, under any circumstances, a compulsive suit against a State for the recovery of money," ibid.,24 he made it equally clear that he
24 The basis for the dictum may be found earlier in the opinion, where Justice Iredell explained that it was uncertain whether Article III's extension of the federal judicial power to cases between a State and citizens of another State "is to be construed as intending merely a transfer of juris-
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