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Our Federalism Changes Course: The Supreme Court Limits State Sovereign Immunity In Bankruptcy Actions, Benjamin C. Hassebrock

Missouri Law Review

Although sovereign immunity jurisprudence is not the most highly publicized topic of debate in the mainstream media, it has recently become a major source of contention on the Supreme Court. The flurry of sovereign immunity litigation that has reached the high court in the last decade has yielded mostly 5-4 decisions that have expanded the state's ability to assert immunity as a defense. Given this trend, few could have predicted the outcome of the court's decision in Central Virginia Community College v. Katz. In Katz, the 5-4 decision broke the other direction, and the court held that states had waived …