Alden v. Maine

In 1992, probation officers employed by the State of Maine filed a suit against their employer in United States District Court for the District of Maine. The probation officers alleged violations of the overtime provisions laid out in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a federal statute, and requested liquidated damages and compensation. The federal court dismissed the suit by stating that the Eleventh Amendment gives the states sovereign immunity from suit in federal court. After the dismissal, the probation officers filed the same action in Maine state court. The state court also dismissed the case based on sovereign immunity. The case was then appealed to the Maine appellate courts and then to the Supreme Court of the United States.

In a 5–4 ruling, the Court concluded that Article I of the Constitution does not provide Congress with the ability to subject nonconsenting states to private suits for damages in its own courts. In addition, the Court held that since Maine was not a consenting party in the suit, the ruling of the Supreme Court of Maine was upheld.

Writing for the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that the Constitution provides immunity for nonconsenting states from suits filed by citizens of that state or citizens of any other state and noted that such immunity is often referred to as "Eleventh Amendment Immunity." Such immunity, the Court continued, is necessary to maintain state sovereignty, which lies at the heart of federalism. However, "sovereign immunity derives not from the Eleventh Amendment but from the federal structure of the original Constitution itself."

After discussing the Eleventh Amendment, the Court turned to the question of whether Congress has the authority, under Article I of the Constitution, to subject nonconsenting states to private suits in their own courts. The majority ruled that Congress has no such authority, under the original Constitution, to abrogate states' sovereign immunity:

Nor can we conclude that the specific Article I powers delegated to Congress necessarily include, by virtue of the Necessary and Proper Clause or otherwise, the incidental authority to subject the States to private suits as a means of achieving objectives otherwise within the scope of the enumerated powers.

However, Congress may abrogate sovereign immunity when the suit is to enforce a statute protecting Fourteenth Amendment rights:

We have held also that in adopting the Fourteenth Amendment, the people required the States to surrender a portion of the sovereignty that had been preserved.... Congress may authorize private suits against nonconsenting States pursuant to its §5 enforcement power...When Congress enacts appropriate legislation to enforce this Amendment, see City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997), federal interests are paramount

The majority stated that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution applies only to pieces of legislation that fit within its design. Therefore, any law passed by Congress pursuant to Article I that seeks to subject states to suit would violate the original Constitution. However, Congress may abrogate state sovereign immunity to pass legislation that enforces the Fourteenth Amendment, as in Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer (1976).

Justice David Souter's dissent argued that the concept of sovereign immunity had been misapplied by the majority. Souter continued by noting that the idea of sovereign immunity was unclear during the period of the Constitution's ratification. In addition, he argued, the Founding Framers would certainly have not expected the idea to remain static over numerous years. Souter further argued that the FLSA was national in scope and so did not violate the principle of federalism, as was argued by the majority.

Souter also argued that the claim the FLSA was unconstitutional was spurious. Such thinking, he argued, could be reached only based upon the misguided notion of sovereign immunity and notion of federalism that the majority had used in reaching its decision:

So there is much irony in the Court's profession that it grounds its opinion on a deeply rooted historical tradition of sovereign immunity, when the Court abandons a principle nearly as inveterate, and much closer to the hearts of the Framers: that where there is a right, there must be a remedy. Lord Chief Justice Holt could state this as an unquestioned proposition already in 1702, as he did in Ashby v. White, 6 Mod. 45, 53-54, 87 Eng. Rep. 808, 815 (K.B.):

"If an Act of Parliament be made for the benefit of any person, and he is hindered by another of that benefit, by necessary consequence of law he shall have an action; and the current of all the books is so." Ibid. (citation omitted).^[1]

Blackstone considered it "a general and indisputable rule, that where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy, by suit or action at law, whenever that right is invaded." 3 Blackstone *23. The generation of the Framers thought the principle so crucial that several States put it into their constitutions.^[2] And when Chief Justice Marshall asked about Marbury, "If he has a right, and that right has been violated, do the laws of his country afford him a remedy?," Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 162 (1803), the question was rhetorical, and the answer clear:

"The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury. One of the first duties of government is to afford that protection. In Great Britain the king himself is sued in the respectful form of a petition, and he never fails to comply with the judgment of his court." Id., at 163.

Yet today the Court has no qualms about saying frankly that the federal right to damages afforded by Congress under the FLSA cannot create a concomitant private remedy.

[...]

The Court has swung back and forth with regrettable disruption on the enforceability of the FLSA against the States, but if the present majority had a defensible position one could at least accept its decision with an expectation of stability ahead. As it is, any such expectation would be naive. The resemblance of today's state sovereign immunity to the Lochner era's industrial due process is striking. The Court began this century by imputing immutable constitutional status to a conception of economic self-reliance that was never true to industrial life and grew insistently fictional with the years, and the Court has chosen to close the century by conferring like status on a conception of state sovereign immunity that is true neither to history nor to the structure of the Constitution. I expect the Court's late essay into immunity doctrine will prove the equal of its earlier experiment in laissez-faire, the one being as unrealistic as the other, as indefensible, and probably as fleeting.

Alden represents an extension of the Court's 1996 ruling in Seminole Tribe v. Florida, which held that Congress cannot use its powers under Article I of the Constitution to subject unconsenting states to suit in federal court. Alden held also that Congress cannot use its Article I powers to subject unconsenting states to suit in state court. Later, in Central Virginia Community College v. Katz (2006), the Court would narrow the scope of its previous sovereign immunity rulings and hold that Congress could use the Bankruptcy Clause of Article I to abrogate state sovereign immunity.

• Chemerinsky, Erwin (1999), "The Hypocrisy of Alden v. Maine: Judicial Review, Sovereign Immunity and the Rehnquist Court", Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 33 (4): 1283–1308
• Marshall, William P.; Cowart, Jason S. (1999), "State Immunity, Political Accountability, and Alden v. Maine", Notre Dame Law Review, 75: 1069
• Young, Ernest A. (1999), "Alden v. Maine and the Jurisprudence of Structure", William & Mary Law Review, 41: 1601
• Tidmarsh, Jay (1999), "A Dialogic Defense of Alden", Notre Dame L. Rev., 75: 1161

• Text of Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706 (1999) is available from: CourtListener Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)