Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/362

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HILTON v. SOUTH CAROLINA PUBLIC RAILWAYS COMM’N Opinion of the Court

the Jones Act (and so too FELA 2) by its terms extends to the States. This coverage, and the jurisdiction of state courts to entertain a suit free from Eleventh Amendment constraints, is a plausible explanation for the absence in Welch of any discussion of the practical adverse effects of overruling that portion of Parden which pertained only to the Eleventh Amendment, since continued state-court jurisdiction made those effects minimal. Further, we cannot treat the holding of Welch as determinative of the issue now presented for our decision. As we explained in Welch, supra, at 471, our Eleventh Amendment cases do indeed hold that “Congress may abrogate the States’ constitutionally secured immunity from suit in federal court only by making its intention unmistakably clear in the language of the statute.” Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 242 (1985) (emphasis added). Congressional intent to abrogate Eleventh Amendment immunity must be expressed in the text of the statute; the Court will not look to legislative history in making its inquiry. Dellmuth v. Muth, 491 U. S. 223, 230 (1989). These cases establish a rule of constitutional law based on the Eleventh Amendment. That rule was developed after the Parden decision, and was found in Welch to have undercut the reasoning of Parden and to require Parden’s Eleventh Amendment holding to be overruled. But as we have stated 2 The specific statutory construction issue reserved in Welch was not the precise issue before the Court today, but rather whether the language of the Jones Act (“Any seaman who shall suffer personal injury in the course of his employment,” 46 U. S. C. App. § 688) was correctly interpreted by the Court in Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Comm’n, 359 U. S. 275, 282–283 (1959), to afford a remedy against the States. Justice White’s concurrence, Welch v. Texas Dept. of Highways and Public Transportation, 483 U. S., at 495, focused on this question, stating that “Congress has not disturbed this construction, and the Court, as I understand it, does not now purport to do so.” The parties, however, agree that the resolution of this issue should be the same for the Jones Act and FELA. We thus assume so for the purposes of this decision.