Eleventh Amendment

The Eleventh Amendment, ratified in 1795, was the first amendment adopted after the Bill of Rights, and it was passed to overturn a Supreme Court decision. It provides that the federal judicial power does not extend to suits against a state by citizens of another state or of a foreign country — the constitutional root of what is called state sovereign immunity.

The trigger was Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), in which the Supreme Court allowed a South Carolina man to sue the state of Georgia in federal court to collect a Revolutionary War debt. The ruling alarmed the states, which had assumed they could not be hauled before federal judges by private creditors without their consent. Congress proposed the amendment almost immediately, and the states ratified it within two years — the fastest constitutional reversal of a Court decision in American history.

What began as a narrow fix has grown into a sweeping doctrine. The Court has read the amendment, together with the broader principle of sovereign immunity, to shield states from many suits for money damages even by their own citizens, absent the state's consent or a valid act of Congress. That has made the Eleventh Amendment a recurring obstacle in cases seeking to hold states accountable under federal civil-rights, disability, and labor laws — an obscure clause with outsized modern consequences.