College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board

College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board, 527 U.S. 666 (1999), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States

Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

relating to the doctrine of sovereign immunity

Sovereign immunity

Sovereign immunity, or crown immunity, is a legal doctrine by which the sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution....

.

A companion case to the similarly named (but not to be confused) Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank
Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank
Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank, 527 U.S. 627 , was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States relating to the doctrine of sovereign immunity....

, 527 U.S. 627 (1999), the court held – in a decision authored by Justice Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia is an American jurist who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. As the longest-serving justice on the Court, Scalia is the Senior Associate Justice...

– that sovereign immunity

Sovereign immunity

Sovereign immunity, or crown immunity, is a legal doctrine by which the sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution....

precluded a private action brought under the Lanham Act

Lanham Act

The Lanham Act is a piece of legislation that contains the federal statutes of trademark law in the United States. The Act prohibits a number of activities, including trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and false advertising.-History:Named for Representative Fritz G...

. For such an action to be sustained, the Court explained, the state must either consent to the suit, or have had its sovereign immunity waived by Congress:

The abrogation exception did not apply, because the U.S. Congress can only waive sovereign immunity pursuant to the power granted by § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...

(see Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer
Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer
Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U.S. 445 , was a United States Supreme Court decision that determined that the U.S. Congress has the power to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity of the states, if this is done pursuant to its Fourteenth Amendment power to enforce upon the states the...

; Seminole Tribe v. Florida
Seminole Tribe v. Florida
Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 , was a United States Supreme Court case which held that Article One of the U.S. Constitution did not give the United States Congress the power to abrogate the sovereign immunity of the states that is further protected under the Eleventh Amendment...

), and both the Lanham Act and the Trademark Remedy Clarification Act were enacted pursuant to Congress' Article I
Article One of the United States Constitution
Article One of the United States Constitution describes the powers of Congress, the legislative branch of the federal government. The Article establishes the powers of and limitations on the Congress, consisting of a House of Representatives composed of Representatives, with each state gaining or...

powers. Moreover, § 5's "term 'enforce' is to be taken seriously—that the object of valid § 5 legislation must be the carefully delimited remediation or prevention of constitutional violations," College Savings Bank at __, and because the asserted property right in question was not in fact a property right ("The hallmark of a protected property interest is the right to exclude others ... [but] [t]he Lanham Act's false-advertising provisions ... bear no relationship to any right to exclude; and Florida Prepaid's alleged misrepresentations concerning its own products intruded upon no interest over which petitioner had exclusive dominion") (id. at __), and so the court declined to "pursue the follow-on question that City of Boerne v. Flores
City of Boerne v. Flores
City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 , was a Supreme Court case concerning the scope of Congress's enforcement power under the fifth section of the Fourteenth Amendment...

would otherwise require us to resolve: whether the prophylactic measure taken under purported authority of § 5 (viz., prohibition of States' sovereign-immunity claims, which are not in themselves a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment) was genuinely necessary to prevent violation of the Fourteenth Amendment." Id. at __.
There was no suggestion that Florida expressly consented to suit, and what was instead asserted was the concept of constructive waiver – the premise that merely by engaging in an activity regulated by Congress, the state waives its immunity. This concept sprung from a single case in the Court's jurisprudence, Parden v. Terminal R.R. Co. of Ala. Docks Dep't, 377 U.S. 184 (1964). But the court characterized Parden as "elliptical," "an anomaly in the jurisprudence of sovereign immunity, and indeed in the jurisprudence of constitutional law," and noted that within ten years of Parden, the court was in headlong retreat from it, saying that there was "'no place' for the doctrine of constructive waiver in our sovereign-immunity jurisprudence, and we emphasized that we would "find waiver only where stated by the most express language or by such overwhelming implications from the text as [will] leave no room for any other reasonable construction." College Savings Bank at __. Parden, the Court observed, "broke sharply with prior cases, and is fundamentally incompatible with later ones. We have never applied the holding of Parden to another statute, and in fact have narrowed the case in every subsequent opinion in which it has been under consideration." The Court expressly overruled "Whatever may remain" of the decision after its narrowing by intervening cases.

See also