The probation officers alleged violations of the overtime provisions laid out in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a federal statute, and requested liquidated damages and compensation.

The majority ruled that Congress has no such authority, under the original Constitution, to abrogate states' sovereign immunity: Nor can we conclude that the specific Article I powers delegated to Congress necessarily include, by virtue of the Necessary and Proper Clause or otherwise, the incidental authority to subject the States to private suits as a means of achieving objectives otherwise within the scope of the enumerated powers.However, Congress may abrogate sovereign immunity when the suit is to enforce a statute protecting Fourteenth Amendment rights: We have held also that in adopting the Fourteenth Amendment, the people required the States to surrender a portion of the sovereignty that had been preserved.... Congress may authorize private suits against nonconsenting States pursuant to its §5 enforcement power...When Congress enacts appropriate legislation to enforce this Amendment, see City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997), federal interests are paramountThe majority stated that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution applies only to pieces of legislation that fit within its design.

Therefore, any law passed by Congress pursuant to Article I that seeks to subject states to suit would violate the original Constitution.

However, Congress may abrogate state sovereign immunity to pass legislation that enforces the Fourteenth Amendment, as in Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer (1976).

Such thinking, he argued, could be reached only based upon the misguided notion of sovereign immunity and notion of federalism that the majority had used in reaching its decision: So there is much irony in the Court's profession that it grounds its opinion on a deeply rooted historical tradition of sovereign immunity, when the Court abandons a principle nearly as inveterate, and much closer to the hearts of the Framers: that where there is a right, there must be a remedy.

Id., at 163.Yet today the Court has no qualms about saying frankly that the federal right to damages afforded by Congress under the FLSA cannot create a concomitant private remedy.

The Court has swung back and forth with regrettable disruption on the enforceability of the FLSA against the States, but if the present majority had a defensible position one could at least accept its decision with an expectation of stability ahead.

The Court began this century by imputing immutable constitutional status to a conception of economic self-reliance that was never true to industrial life and grew insistently fictional with the years, and the Court has chosen to close the century by conferring like status on a conception of state sovereign immunity that is true neither to history nor to the structure of the Constitution.