Despite the text, the Eleventh Amendment essentially enacts or codifies state sovereign immunity; viz., states cannot be sued without their consent, even if the federal Congress says so. The Amendment on its face only limits suits against, say, California by non-Californians, but the Supreme Court held in Hans v. Louisiana (I may have that name wrong) that this actually means even Californians cannot sue California. The reasoning is that if they were allowed to, then a non-Californian with a case against the state could just assign (read: sell) his claim to a Californian to prosecute, and the state would be unprotected.
Later 11th A. cases have continued this trend of ignoring the text. The Amendment essentially prohibits any action against a state without the state’s consent. (States do in fact give this consent from time to time because it’s just to do so or for political reasons; if you get run over by the grounds crew of a state park on your way home today, you probably will be able to sue them because your state has consented by passing a State Tort Claims Act.)
There are exeptions to this basic prohibition. First, although you can’t get damages from a state for past injuries, you can often get an injunction to prevent the state from injuring you in the immediate future, such as by charging a tax you think is illegal, knocking down a house, prosecuting you under an unconstitutional statute, whatever. You do this not by suing the state, but by suing the officer in charge of the agency. That’s why if you go to law school, you’ll see a lot of cases styled “Jones v. Davis, Administrator of State Revenue.”
The federal government also has a limited power to abrogate a state’s immunity if the U.S. Congress is acting under the authority granted it under the Fourteenth Amendment (and maybe the 13th and 15th – unknown, I think.) The 14th Amendment is the one which guarantees Equal Protection of the Laws and Due Process to all in the U.S., regardless of state citizenship. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the law prohibiting employment discrimination) is a proper abrogation of state power because it’s meant to address a problem (racial discrimination) that’s goes specifically towards these equal protection guarantees. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, however, states that it was passed under Congress’ power to regulate commerce, not equal protection, so it is not completely applicable to states.
Enforcing copyright and patents is also not a proper abrogation because patents aren’t part of the 14th A., even though the Constitution proper extends to Congress full authority over them. Congress can pass a law prohibiting states from copying your patented designs, but you can’t enforce that law against the state unless the state consents. So if the University of Florida chooses not to make its students pay royalties on copyrighted books the school copies for them, there’s nothing the copyright owners can do about it. (See the Florida Pre-Paid case.)
Most laws actually come rather close to meaning what they say, but the 11th Amendment is not one of them.
–Cliffy,
law-school graduate