Court Upholds State Power in S.C. Port Case

In another victory for states’ rights, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the principle of “sovereign immunity” shields a state agency from being called before a federal administrative hearing and charged with violating the law.

Speaking for the 5-4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said it would be “an affront to a state’s dignity” to force its officials to appear at a federal administrative proceeding.

The decision, in a case involving docking rights for cruise ships, extends recent rulings that have limited the reach of federal authority and elevated the status of the states as “sovereign entities.”

In 1996, the same justices in Tuesday’s majority ruled that states, including public universities and state-run hospitals, are generally immune from being sued for violating federal laws.

Since then, the court has thrown out lawsuits brought by a Florida college professor who says he was paid less because of his age, an Alabama hospital worker who was fired after surviving breast cancer and a Maine probation officer who was not paid for overtime work.

The justices also barred suits against state agencies over stolen patents, trademarks and copyrights--all violations of federal law.

The court’s conservative majority said it was not trying to destroy federal law, but rather maintain the structure set in the original Constitution of 1787.

“By guarding against encroachments by the federal government on fundamental aspects of state sovereignty, we strive to maintain the balance of power embodied in our Constitution,” Thomas wrote. “Sovereign immunity ... accords States the dignity that is consistent with their status as sovereign entities,” he added.

The four liberals, in an unusually harsh dissent, accused the conservatives of making up a principle that does not appear in the Constitution and using it to whittle away at progressive laws enacted during the 20th century.

The Constitution says, “The laws of the United States ... shall be the supreme law of the land.”

“Where does the majority find its constitutional prohibition” on federal administrative proceedings? Breyer asked in his dissent, which he read aloud. “Not in the Constitution’s text, which says not a word about it. Not in history. Not in tradition.”

Though Tuesday’s decision arose from a dispute over access to a port in South Carolina, the dissenters said the court’s ruling would hinder enforcement of federal laws that protect the environment and assure the health and safety of workers. Often, agencies use investigations, hearings and fines to force others, including states, to abide by federal law.

“Just as this principle of [state sovereign immunity] has no logical starting place, I fear that neither does it have any logical stopping point,” Breyer said in his dissent.

Until reined in, “I fear [it] will be randomly destructive,” he said.

The court’s conservatives have said that sovereign immunity comes from the 11th Amendment, which reads, “The Judicial Power of the United States shall not extend ... to any suit in law” brought against one state by “citizens of another state or ... of any foreign state.”

This case did not involve “judicial power,” but an agency hearing, and it concerned a complaint by a South Carolina company against the South Carolina State Ports Authority.

Undeterred, Thomas said the “sovereign immunity enjoyed by the states extends beyond the literal text of the 11th Amendment.”

In the past, conservatives have accused liberals of inventing doctrines that were not mentioned in the Constitution, such as the right to privacy.

In something of a role reversal, Breyer hammered the conservatives for relying on a fictional doctrine, so much so that Thomas fired back in a footnote, accusing the liberals of “engaging in a type of ahistorical literalism.”

Rhetoric aside, Tuesday’s ruling concerned only a mechanism for enforcing the law, not the substance of the law itself.

The justices threw out a complaint brought by one cruise line against the state-run port authority.

A South Carolina maritime company had asked repeatedly to berth a cruise ship, the M/V Tropic Seas, at Charleston. The ship offered short cruises that featured casino gambling. State officials replied that they did not want gambling ships in port.

But the complaining company said the state’s decision was unfair and discriminatory because Carnival Cruise Lines had berthed two ships that also offered gambling. The competing cruise line complained to the Federal Maritime Commission, a small independent agency based in Washington, which assigned an administrative law judge to hold a hearing.

South Carolina officials balked, citing states’ rights, and they won a major victory before the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the onetime capital of the Confederacy.

Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson said “the doctrine of sovereign immunity predates the founding of our nation ... [and] is among the Constitution’s foremost principles.”

The federal agency, backed by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, appealed the issue to the Supreme Court.

But the majority said an administrative hearing “bears a remarkably strong resemblance to civil litigation in federal court”--and since states are shielded from lawsuits, they also should be shielded from administrative hearings.

“We hold that state sovereign immunity bars such an adjudicative proceeding,” Thomas said in Federal Maritime Commission vs. South Carolina State Ports Authority, 01-46. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy agreed.

Besides Breyer, the dissenters were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.