COURT'S VOTES FAVOR STATES; JUSTICES DELIVER BLOW AGAINST FEDERALISM.

Byline: Linda Greenhouse The New York Times

Thrusting the doctrine of state sovereignty well beyond existing boundaries, the Supreme Court on Wednesday placed sharp new curbs on the ability of Congress to make federal law binding on the states.

In three cases, all decided by identical 5-4 votes, the court made states immune from suits by state employees for violations of federal labor law; by patent owners for infringement of their patents by state universities and agencies; and by people bringing unfair competition suits over states' activities in the marketplace.

In the labor case, in particular, the court already had ruled that a state's sovereign immunity meant it could not be sued in federal court. The court's decision Wednesday closed the only other avenue for employees to try to force a state to comply with federal law: bringing a lawsuit in state court. The ruling, then, leaves enforcement to individual federal agencies, like the Labor Department, but government lawyers argued that the department does not have the resources to sue every time there is a complaint.

While each decision will have similar substantial impact, the whole of the court's actions Wednesday, the final day of the 1998-99 term, was greater than the sum of its parts. It was the most powerful indication yet of a narrow majority's determination to reconfigure the balance between state and federal authority in favor of the states.

``Congress has vast power but not all power,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy declared in one of the decisions, a case from Maine holding that state employees cannot bring suits for violations of federal labor law. ``When Congress legislates in matters affecting the states,'' Kennedy continued, ``it may not treat these sovereign entities as mere prefectures or corporations. Congress must accord states the esteem due to them as joint participants in a federal system.''

The three decisions were announced from the bench in a scene of extraordinary drama. As the author of each majority opinion - Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist - summarized his reasoning and conclusion, a different one of the four dissenters spoke in rebuttal. The rhetorical volleys, with Justices David H. Souter, Stephen G. Breyer and John Paul Stevens speaking in dissent, consumed some 45 minutes and held the audience of tourists and government lawyers spellbound.

Pungent language

Stevens, using pungent language that did not appear in the written dissent, accused the majority of constructing a doctrine of sovereign immunity ``much like a mindless dragon that indiscriminately chews gaping holes in federal statutes.'' He said the court was returning to a ``brief period of confusion and crisis when our new nation was governed by the Articles of Confederation.''

The other justices in the five-member majority were Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the fourth dissenter.

When the court's work was over, two federal laws had been declared unconstitutional, one 35-year-old precedent was explicitly overturned and one 15-year-old precedent was effectively dead.

Heart of debate

And it was also strikingly apparent that the fault line that runs through the current court as an all but unbridgeable gulf has to do not with the higher-profile issues of race, religion, abortion or due process, but federalism. It was clear both from the courtroom scene and from the 185 pages of often impassioned prose the court produced in the three cases that for these justices, the question of the proper allocation of authority within the American system is not abstract or theoretical but urgent and fundamental, with the two sides holding irreconcilable visions of what the Constitution's framers had in mind.

At the heart of the debate was the meaning of the 11th Amendment, which stripped the federal courts of authority to hear suits against one state by a citizen of another. The court has long interpreted the amendment as also barring suits by people against their own state. The court also had viewed Congress as having the power to abrogate the states' immunity from particular types of lawsuits, if it did so explicitly.

Three years ago, in Seminole Tribe vs. Florida, the court overturned one of its precedents by the same 5-4 vote as in the decisions Wednesday. It ruled that Congress did not have the power to force states to defend themselves in federal court under laws enacted under the authority of Article I of the Constitution, including laws that regulate interstate commerce.

One such law was the Fair Labor Standards Act, a basic federal labor law that established minimum wages and hours and that Congress had extended in 1974 to cover millions of people employed by states. In an early taste of the current federalism battle, the Supreme Court declared that extension unconstitutional in 1976, only to reverse itself in 1985, in a hotly disputed 5-4 ruling called Garcia vs. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority. Rehnquist, then an associate justice, declared in dissent in the Garcia case that he would work to have the court reverse itself again.

Maine point

In 1992, 65 state probation officers and juvenile caseworkers in Maine had sued the state in federal court for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by not giving them premium pay for overtime. The case was still pending when the Supreme Court issued the Seminole Tribe decision, which clearly required the dismissal of the state workers' suit.

Because Congress also had provided that employees could bring Fair Labor Standards Act cases in state court, the workers refiled their case in the Maine courts. But the Maine Supreme Court ruled last year that the state enjoyed sovereign immunity in its own courts similar to its 11th Amendment immunity in federal court, and dismissed the lawsuit. The question in one case the court decided Wednesday, Alden vs. Maine, No. 98-436, was whether closing the state courthouse doors to a suit based on a federally protected right was a proper application of state sovereign immunity.