Opinion of the Court
Amendment, and our sovereign-immunity precedents did not bear on the question because they “concerned questions of federal-court jurisdiction.” Id., at 420. The Court also found unpersuasive the fact that the Constitution delineates several limitations on States’ authority, such as Article I powers granted exclusively to Congress and Article IV requirements imposed on States. Id., at 425. Despite acknowledging “that ours is not a union of 50 wholly independent sovereigns,” Hall inferred from the lack of an express sovereign immunity granted to the States and from the Tenth Amendment that the States retained the power in their own courts to deny immunity to other States. Ibid.
Chief Justice Burger, Justice Blackmun, and Justice Rehnquist dissented.
B
Hall’s determination that the Constitution does not contemplate sovereign immunity for each State in a sister State’s courts misreads the historical record and misapprehends the “implicit ordering of relationships within the federal system necessary to make the Constitution a workable governing charter and to give each provision within that document the full effect intended by the Framers.” Id., at 433 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). As Chief Justice Marshall explained, the Founders did not state every postulate on which they formed our Republic—“we must never forget, that it is a constitution we are expounding.” McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 407 (1819). And although the Constitution assumes that the States retain their sovereign immunity except as otherwise provided, it also fundamentally adjusts the States’ relationship with each other and curtails their ability, as sovereigns, to decline to recognize each other’s immunity.
