Cite as: 527 U. S. 706 (1999)
Souter, J., dissenting
Court says, "inheres in the system of federalism established by the Constitution," ante, at 730, its "contours [being] determined by the Founders' understanding, not by the principles or limitations derived from natural law," ante, at 734. Again, "[w]e look both to the essential principles of federalism and to the special role of the state courts in the constitutional design." Ante, at 748. That is, the Court believes that the federal constitutional structure itself necessitates recognition of some degree of state autonomy broad enough to include sovereign immunity from suit in a State's own courts, regardless of the federal source of the claim asserted against the State. If one were to read the Court's federal structure rationale in isolation from the preceding portions of the opinion, it would appear that the Court's position on state sovereign immunity might have been rested entirely on federalism alone. If it had been, however, I would still be in dissent, for the Court's argument that state-court sovereign immunity on federal questions is inherent in the very concept of federal structure is demonstrably mistaken.
A
The National Constitution formally and finally repudiated the received political wisdom that a system of multiple sovereignties constituted the "great solecism of an imperium in imperio," cf. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, at 223.31 Once "the atom of sovereignty" had been split, U. S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U. S. 779,
31 The authority of the view that Parliament's sovereignty must be indivisible had already been eroded in the decade before independence. Ire-dell himself, as early as 1774, rejected the applicability of the theory "to the case of several distinct and independent legislatures each engaged within a separate scale and employed about different objects," in the course of arguing for the possibility of a kind of proto-federalist relationship between the Colonies and the King. Iredell, Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, in 1 G. McRee, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell 205, 219 (1857, reprinted 1949); see Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, at 224-225, and n. 64.
799
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