Can someone explain the 11th amendment to me?

[ineedhelp]

Not a homework question, just personal research.

Wikipedia is almost useless.
The original text seems to only prohibit citizens of state X from suing state Y, but how did that evolve into State X is immune from its own citizens and payment of any monetary damages?

Wikipedia does cite Hans v LA but I want to know the reasoning behind interpreting the original text to prohibit suits against states from their own citizens.

[Telemark]

This seems to be a good summary: 11th Amendment legal definition of 11th Amendment

[Jormungandr]

Q30. “The wording of the Constitution gets confusing, which is understandable since it was written in the 18th century and uses legal terms that most laymen have never had cause to learn. Specifically, I can’t make heads or tails of Amendments XI and XII. Could you explain these to me?”

[pravnik]

The reasoning in Hans is more or less that the 11th Amendment didn’t specifically mention sovereign immunity from suits by its own citizens is because it more or less went without saying:

It is an attempt to strain the constitution and the law to a construction never imagined or dreamed of. Can we suppose that, when the eleventh amendment was adopted, it was understood to be left open for citizens of a state to sue their own state in the federal courts, while the idea of suits by citizens of other states, or of foreign states, was indignantly repelled? Suppose that congress, when proposing the eleventh amendment, had appended to it a proviso that nothing therein contained should prevent a state from being sued by its own citizens in cases arising under the constitution or laws of the United Shates, can we imagine that it would have been adopted by the states? The supposition that it would is almost an absurdity on its face.

Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U.S. 1 (1890). More recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been even more blunt and stated that depsite the fact that it’s frequently called 11th Amendment immunity, that “sovereign immunity derives not from the Eleventh Amendment but from the federal structure of the original Constitution itself.” Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706 (1999).

[Cliffy]

Yeah, the 11th makes no sense. The basic reasoning, if you can call it that, is that the prohibition on foreigner suits against states is meaningless if a similar prohibition doesn’t exist against citizen suits, because then a Marylander with a claim against Virginia could just sell it to a Virginian and suddenly Virginia would be liable. But I don’t really buy it, because the underlying facts of the claim are still the same, so the the courts could easily read the Amendment to apply to the claim itself, not the person to whom it happens to have been assigned.

Also, while I understand the rationale of sovereign immunity, 1) states aren’t nations; and, 2) there is no structural demand for sov. immunity, especially in a Republic that existed specifically in order to overthrow (at least some) non-democratic artifacts of the ancien regime. That is – if the states wanted sov. immunity, it needed to be enacted through amendment, which the 11th Amendment quite plainly on its text did not do.

–Cliffy

[friedo]

1. States may not be nations, but they are sovereign and share sovereignty with the federal government. That’s a settled issue.

2. Sovereign immunity is an artifact of the common law. The fact that we don’t have a monarch any more doesn’t mean we threw out all of our legal institutions. We just replaced “the crown” with “the people” and gave most of the monarchy’s powers to elected executive and legislators, while banning a small few outright.

[UltraVires]

I was under the impression that with all of the 14th amendment equal protection suits against states (like under the ADA, for example), the 11th amendment has been all but formally repealed.

[pravnik]

@jtgain

I was under the impression that with all of the 14th amendment equal protection suits against states (like under the ADA, for example), the 11th amendment has been all but formally repealed.

Yes, but only in regard to enforcing 14th Amendment guarantees against the states (see Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer). When Congress has tried to pass laws making states liable in federal courts or in their own state courts under the Commerce Clause, SCOTUS declared it unconstitutional.

[ZenBeam]

Well here’s the actual text:

@11th Amendment

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or Equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

I haven’t read all the links, but I look at the word “another” and wonder how that isn’t taken to explicitly mean it doesn’t apply to citizens suing their own state. They could easily have used the word “a” instead if they didn’t want that exclusion.

[Cliffy]

@friedo

1. States may not be nations, but they are sovereign and share sovereignty with the federal government. That’s a settled issue.

Bootstrapping. Sure it’s settled now. Also, it’s dumb.

2. Sovereign immunity is an artifact of the common law…

Same objection – states aren’t nations, so this argument, which maybe should apply to the United States, doesn’t intrinsically pertain to the states.

–Cliffy