Pennhurst State School & Hospital v. Halderman 451 U.S. 1 (1981) 457 U.S. 1131 (1984)

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PENNHURST STATE SCHOOL & HOSPITAL v. HALDERMAN 451 U.S. 1 (1981) 457 U.S. 1131 (1984)

Pennhurst worked major changes in the interpretation of the eleventh amendment and in the pendent jurisdiction of federal courts over claims based on state law. These changes remove one important weapon from the arsenal of civil rights plaintiffs.

Terri Lee Halderman, a resident of Pennhurst, a state institution for the mentally retarded, commenced a class action in federal district court against Pennhurst and a number of state and local officials. She alleged that squalor, abuse of residents, and other conditions at Pennhurst violated the federal developmentally disabled assistance and bill of rights act of 1975, the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment, and Pennsylvania's statute governing mental retardation. After a long trial, the district court agreed with her on all counts, and held that mentally retarded people in the state's care had a due process right to live in "the least restrictive setting" that would serve their needs. The court's injunction ordered the defendants to close Pennhurst and place its residents in "suitable living arrangements." The court of appeals affirmed, but rested decision only on the federal statute. The Supreme Court reversed, instructing the lower courts to consider whether the district court's order was justified on the basis of the Constitution or state law. On remand, the court of appeals avoided the constitutional issue, holding that state law required reaffirmance of the "least restrictive setting" ruling. When the case returned to the Supreme Court, the Court held, 5–4, that the Eleventh Amendment barred the district court's injunction. (The case was then settled, with the state agreeing to close Pennhurst and to move its residents to their home communities, or to other institutions if they were aged or ill.)

justice lewis f. powell ' s opinion of the court announced that the doctrine of sovereign immunity is a constitutional principle, based on the Eleventh Amendment, which gives a state immunity from suit in a federal court by an individual plaintiff. In Powell's novel reading, ex parte young (1908) stands for a narrow exception to this immunity, allowing a suit in federal court for an injunction against a state officer only when the plaintiff's claim is based on a violation of the federal Constitution. (Perhaps violations of federal statutes will fit within this category, because of the operation of the supremacy clause.) Suits in federal court against state officers—even suits for injunctive relief—are thus barred by the Eleventh Amendment when they are based on claimed violations of state law.

Prior to Pennhurst an action in federal court founded on federal question jurisdiction could include a claim for relief on state law grounds, when both the federal and state claims arose out of the same facts. However, Powell said, this doctrine of pendent jurisdiction rests only on concerns for efficiency and convenience, concerns that must give way to the force of the Eleventh Amendment.

For the dissenters, Justice john paul stevens decried the Court's overruling of some two dozen precedents, and defended the long-established understanding of Ex parte Young: that when a state officer's conduct is illegal (under either federal or state law), the officer is "stripped" of the cloak of the sovereign's immunity. Here it was perverse to clothe Pennsylvania's officers with the state's Eleventh Amendment immunity when they were acting in violation of their sovereign's commands as embodied in state law. Justice william j. brennan, dissenting separately, argued that the amendment does not bar a suit by a citizen against the citizen's own state.

thePennhurst majority opinion is vulnerable to criticism for its historical analysis of the Eleventh Amendment, for its casual dismissal of the importance of the federal courts' pendent jurisdiction, and for its choice to confer immunity on wrongdoing officials in the name of the sovereignty of the very state that had made the officials' conduct illegal. These criticisms seem minor, however, in the light of another one that is far more grave. The majority, in denying private citizens a vital judicial remedy against official lawlessness, weakened the rule of law.

Kenneth L. Karst
(1986)