Cite as: 527 U. S. 706 (1999)
Souter, J., dissenting
There was nothing "established" about the position espoused by Georgia in the effort to repudiate its debts, and the Court's implausible suggestion to the contrary merely echoes the brio of its remark in Seminole Tribe that Chisholm was "contrary to the well-understood meaning of the Constitution." 517 U. S., at 69 (citing Principality of Monaco v. Mississippi, 292 U. S. 313, 325 (1934)). The fact that Chisholm was no conceptual aberration is apparent from the ratification debates and the several state requests to rewrite Article III. There was no received view either of the role this sovereign immunity would play in the circumstances of the case or of a conceptual foundation for immunity doctrine at odds with Chisholm's reading of Article III. As an author on whom the Court relies, see ante, at 724, has it, "there was no unanimity among the Framers that immunity would exist," D. Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years: 1789-1888, p. 19 (1985).29
but an authoritative declaration of its true construction." Respublica v. Cobbet, 3 Dall. 467, 472 (1798). The court expressly repudiated the historical component of this claim in an opinion by its Chief Justice: "When the judicial law [i. e., the Judiciary Act of 1789] was passed, the opinion prevailed that States might be sued, which by this amendment is settled otherwise." Id., at 475 (M'Kean, C. J.).
29 The Court might perhaps respond that if the role of state sovereign immunity was not the subject of universal consensus in 1792, the enactment of the Eleventh Amendment brought the doctrine into the constitutional realm. The strongest form of this view must maintain that, notwithstanding the Amendment's silence regarding state courts and its exclusive focus on the federal judicial power, the motivation of the framers of the Eleventh Amendment must have been affirmatively to embrace the position that the States enjoyed the immunity from suit previously enjoyed by the Crown. On this account, the framers of the Eleventh Amendment said nothing about sovereign immunity in state court because it never occurred to them that such immunity could be questioned; had they thought of this possibility, they would have considered it absurd that States immune in federal court could be subjected to suit in their own courts.
The first trouble with this view is that it assumes that the Eleventh Amendment was intended to reach all federal-law suits, and not only those arising under diversity jurisdiction. If the framers of the Eleventh
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