Alden, John v. Maine (06/23/1999)

By: Katie Moore, Medill News Service

Questions presented

(1) May a state court refuse to entertain a federal statutory private party cause of action against the state or state agency -- such as an action against the state of Maine under overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act -- on the basis of state sovereign immunity? (2) If a state court may properly refuse to entertain such an action on the basis of state sovereign immunity in certain circumstances but not in others, may a state court do so in circumstances in which that court entertains analogous state statutory actions?

Brief

For John Alden and 66 other probation officers and juvenile case workers in the state of Maine, guaranteed time-and-a-half overtime pay is not something that should be taken for granted.

In December 1992, the group filed suit against the state of Maine in federal court asking for the overtime their employer, the state, owed them under a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the probation officers, saying that because of amendments made to the law guaranteeing overtime pay to police officers, other state employees are guaranteed overtime pay as well.

The state then began to pay Alden and the group overtime, but the two parties once again disagreed on how much.

But before the federal court could resolve the dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Seminole Tribe v. Florida that Congress' attempt to override states' 11th amendment immunity from lawsuits brought by private persons was beyond the powers granted to the legislature in the Constitution.

The federal court then dismissed Alden's case, because even though the Fair Labor Standards Act made it illegal to deny someone time-and-a-half overtime pay, the state could not be sued by a private party.

Alden then filed suit against the state in the Maine Superior Court. But the probation officers had no luck there either.

""If a plaintiff can't seek damages against the state for violations of federal law in federal court, the plaintiff can't seek damages in state court either,"" said the Superior Court of Maine in August 1998.

The 11th Amendment only protects states from lawsuits brought by some private people in federal court, but the Superior Court said the principle of sovereign immunity on which the amendment is based holds true in state court as well. The court dismissed the case because it said the plaintiffs couldn't sue a state in its own courts without the state's consent.

Alden argued the state implied a waiver of its immunity by participating in employment contracts with the employees, and is therefore subject to a lawsuit if the terms of the federal law are broken. But the state overtime law specifically said that public employees could not sue the state for unpaid overtime, and the court rejected Alden's argument because there was no implied waiver.

The U.S. Solicitor General intervened on the side of the probation officers and filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on their behalf. The Court granted certiorari on Nov. 9, 1998.

On June 23, 1999, a divided Court sided with Maine, holding that a state's immunity from suit is central to the dignity of sovereignty and beyond congressional power to abrogate by Article I legislation.

Calling the issue of whether Congress has the authority under Article I to abrogate a state's immunity in its own courts a question of first impression, the 5-4 majority concluded that states retained their immunity and their authority to allow private suits against the sovereign in their own courts.

In a 51-page opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy reasoned that private suits against nonconsenting states could threaten their financial integrity, and argued that the surrender of immunity carries with it substantial costs to the autonomy, decisionmaking ability, and sovereign capacity of the states. ""Congress has vast power but not all power,"" Kennedy wrote.

In so holding, the majority concluded that Maine had not waived its immunity and found no evidence that it had manipulated its immunity in a systematic fashion to discriminate against federal causes of action.

Justices David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stpehen Breyer dissented.