Opinion of the Court
295 (1918), water rights, Hinderlider v. La Plata River & Cherry Creek Ditch Co., 304 U. S. 92, 110 (1938), or the interpretation of interstate compacts, Petty v. Tennessee–Missouri Bridge Comm’n, 359 U. S. 275, 278–279 (1959). The States would have had the raw power to apply their own law to such matters before they entered the Union, but the Constitution implicitly forbids that exercise of power because the “interstate… nature of the controversy makes it inappropriate for state law to control.” Texas Industries, supra, at 641. Some subjects that were decided by pure “political power” before ratification now turn on federal “rules of law.” Rhode Island v. Massachusetts, 12 Pet. 657, 737 (1838). See Clark, Federal Common Law: A Structural Reinterpretation, 144 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1245, 1322–1331 (1996).
Interstate sovereign immunity is similarly integral to the structure of the Constitution. Like a dispute over borders or water rights, a State’s assertion of compulsory judicial process over another State involves a direct conflict between sovereigns. The Constitution implicitly strips States of any power they once had to refuse each other sovereign immunity, just as it denies them the power to resolve border disputes by political means. Interstate immunity, in other words, is “implied as an essential component of federalism.” Hall, 440 U. S., at 430–431 (Blackmun, J., dissenting).
Hyatt argues that we should find no right to sovereign immunity in another State’s courts because no constitutional provision explicitly grants that immunity. But this is precisely the type of “ahistorical literalism” that we have rejected when “interpreting the scope of the States’ sovereign immunity since the discredited decision in Chisholm.” Alden, 527 U. S., at 730; see id., at 736 (“[T]he bare text of the Amendment is not an exhaustive description of the States’ constitutional immunity from suit”). In light of our constitutional structure, the historical under-
