Alden V Maine 1999

Summarizes Alden v. Maine (U.S. Supreme Court, No. 98-436 (1999)), which established that private individuals may not sue a state in state court to enforce the provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) unless the state waives its sovereign immunity.

THIS CASEBOOK contains a selection of U. S. Court of Appeals decisions that analyze, interpret and apply the doctrine of Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity. * * * The Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution provides: "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." U.S. Const. amend. XI. The Supreme Court in Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U.S. 1, 10 S.Ct. 504, 33 L.Ed. 842 (1890), "extended the Eleventh Amendment's reach to suits by in-state plaintiffs, thereby barring all private suits against non-consenting States in federal court." Lombardo v. Pa., Dep't of Pub. Welfare, 540 F.3d 190, 194 (3d Cir. 2008) (emphasis omitted). Immunity from suit in federal court under the Eleventh Amendment is designed to preserve the delicate and "proper balance between the supremacy of federal law and the separate sovereignty of the States." Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706, 757, 119 S.Ct. 2240, 144 L.Ed.2d 636 (1999). The Eleventh Amendment serves two fundamental imperatives: safeguarding the dignity of the states and ensuring their financial solvency. See Hess v. Port Auth. Trans-Hudson Corp., 513 U.S. 30, 52, 115 S.Ct. 394, 130 L.Ed.2d 245 (1994) (identifying "States' solvency and dignity" as the concerns underpinning the Eleventh Amendment). Karns v. Shanahan, 879 F. 3d 504 (3rd Cir. 2018)

The theory of natural law grounds human laws in the universal truths of God’s creation. Until very recently, lawyers in the Western tradition studied natural law as part of their training, and the task of the judicial system was to put its tenets into concrete form, building an edifice of positive law on natural law’s foundations. Although much has been written about natural law in theory, surprisingly little has been said about how it has shaped legal practice. Natural Law in Court asks how lawyers and judges made and interpreted natural law arguments in England, Europe, and the United States, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the American Civil War. R. H. Helmholz sees a remarkable consistency in how English, Continental, and early American jurisprudence understood and applied natural law in cases ranging from family law and inheritance to criminal and commercial law. Despite differences in their judicial systems, natural law was treated across the board as the source of positive law, not its rival. The idea that no person should be condemned without a day in court, or that penalties should be proportional to the crime committed, or that self-preservation confers the right to protect oneself against attacks are valuable legal rules that originate in natural law. From a historical perspective, Helmholz concludes, natural law has advanced the cause of justice.

Most simply said, this dissertation is about whether the citizen of one state of the United States may sue another state of the United States despite the Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads: 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. Though this provision addresses the broader issue of states' sovereignty, the principle objective of this work, Chisholm to Alden: James Wilson's "Artificial Person" in American Constitutional History, 1793-1999, is on the suability of the states. To appropriately appraise this subject, I investigate what the original intent of those who wrote the Constitution was and what various Courts in the history of US jurisprudence consider that intent or meaning to have been, ending with the textualist-originalist Justices of the 1990s, many or whom remain on the bench today. This is a discombobulating task, for there were so many differing opinions at the Federal Convention as to what the text meant, that there cannot be just one. Therefore, taking a look at some of the major cases that address states' suability in US Supreme Court history, I focus on the more specific question of what could have reasonably been meant by the Founders on states' suability. The point of departure for this venture is Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), since it was the impetus for the Eleventh Amendment, with aspecial focus on James Wilson's opinion in the case. From there, selected cases from theMarshall Court through to the 1999 case of Alden v. Maine are carefully discussed as a meansof discovering whether or not the states were ever actually suable and which cases may haveled more modern Courts astray.

Preemption is a doctrine of American constitutional law, under which states and local governments are deprived of their power to act in a given area, whether or not the state or local law, rule or action is in direct conflict with federal law. This book covers not only the basics of preemption but also focuses on such topics as federal mechanisms for agency preemption, implied forms of preemption, and defensive use of federal preemption in civil litigation.

The Supreme Court is frequently portrayed as an isolated entity void of politics that reaches judgments by some unseen and unknowable logic. At the same time, Congress is cast as a singularly political enterprise with little regard for nuanced lawmaking. This volume of original essays by leading scholars shows both branches in a new light. It explores the impact of sustained partisan politics, the recent reassertion of legislative power at the expense of judicial review, and the sometimes stormy relationship between Congress and the Court.