11th Amendment
The Eleventh Amendment, ratified in 1795, states that 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...".
The Amendment was passed as a reaction to Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S (2 Dall.) 419, 1 L.Ed. 440 (1793), where the Supreme Court found that it had jurisdiction when the executor of a South Carolina estate brought an action to recover the debt the state of Georgia owed his decedent.
The amendment recognizes that states have a certain degree of sovereign immunity. They are not mere subordinates to the federal government but instead virtual quasi-sovereigns. While the original Constitution gave the Supreme Court jurisdiction over States when non-citizens brought actions against them, the 11th amendment was a legitimate change to the original Constitution, ratified by three-fourths of the states and binding as a limit on judicial power. Only future amendments could abrogate such constitutional sovereign immunity.
Originally the 11th Amendment only forbade actions by non-citizens against a defendant state. But Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U.S. 1, 10 S.Ct. 504, 33 L.Ed. 842 (1890) extended the doctrine of such sovereign immunity, holding that the 11th Amendment barred suit even by citizens of that defendant state. All private parties were subject to the amendment, although other states and the federal government could still bring actions against a state.
Where Federalism had created a tension between state and federal sovereignty, the 11th amendment had tried to resolve such tension in favor of the states. The result, however, was that states became virtually immune to federal law, since private parties could not sue. To avoid such problems, the Supreme Court eventually adopted the legal fiction of the Stripping Doctrine, which recognizes that private parties can sue state officers in their official capacity for injunctive relief.
