Edleman v. Jordan: A Second Look at Justice Douglas’s Dissenting Opinion.
The majority opinion inEdleman v. Jordan, penned by Justice Rehnquist, held that the Eleventh Amendment barred a suit brought by citizens of Illinois to receive retroactive welfare payments against Illinois. The majority based its reasoning on the fact that, although the named defendant was the director of the state department in charge of administering the funds, the State was the actual party because if the sought relief were to be administered, the monies retroactively disbursed would come from the state treasury. The Court further noted in its holding that Illinois’ participation in the federal program, the “Aid to the Aged, Blind, and Disabled Act” (AABD), did not equate to a waiver of sovereign immunity because for Congress to abrogate a state’s immunity, it must “include an unequivocal and unmistakably clear statutory statement that immunity has been abrogated.” The majority found no such statement and therefore held that Illinois was immune from suit in this instance.
The opinion of Justice Douglas, although written in dissent, deserves re-examination. In his opinion, Douglas reasons that by participating in the program, Illinois did, in fact, waive its immunity from suit. Douglas drew this conclusion from the Court’s prior holding in Parden v. Terminal R. Co., where the Court held that “common sense of the Nation’s federalism” dictated that because the State of Alabama participated in a federal program, it “necessarily consented to such suits as was authorized by that Act.” Herein lays Douglas’s first departure from deciding this case correctly. In Parden, as the majority points out, the congressional enactment that that case arose out of had the requisite clear statement of abrogation that Alabama consented to upon receiving the funds. In the instant case, again as the majority noted, no such statement was present in the language of the Act. In fact, in footnote 16 of the majority opinion, Justice Rehnquist presented that a bill that would have required retroactive payments to eligible persons denied such benefits was actually struck down in the House of Representatives. If anything, this isthe unequivocal and unmistakably clear evidenceDouglas was looking for, howeverthis “clear statement” shows that Congress did not intend to abrogate a participating State’s immunity. Quoting language from Parden, Douglas does present a valid argument that “when a State leaves the sphere that is exclusively its own and enters into activities subject to congressional regulation, it subjects itself to that regulation as fully as if it were a private person or corporation” as further justification for abrogating Illinois’ immunity from suit, but again, absent a clear statement of abrogation, that State maintains its immunity.
Justice Douglas’s dissenting opinion also falls short of the correct conclusion when he argues that the impact of prospective relief and retroactive relief would be precisely the same on the state treasury. The majority points out the error in Douglas’s argument by proffering thatorders of retroactive relief would have the effect of less money for future payments from the program. One of the justifications for state sovereign immunity is protection of the state fisc. If Justice Douglas had his way, this justification would be disregarded because when state officials balance the state’s budget, they only account for payments pursuant to the way in which the State plans on spending the money. If the State did not allocate funds for court ordered retroactive relief, then the state treasury is compromised, rendering Douglas’s conclusion incorrect.
Justice Douglas’s dissent in Edelman reached the wrong conclusion because he incorrectly applied the Court’s holding in Parden and ignored an essential goal of state sovereign immunity.