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Rh new rates for railroads and adopting high fines and penalties for failure to comply with the rates. Id., at 128–129, 131. The law purported to provide no option to challenge the new rates other than disobeying the law and taking “the risk … of being subjected to such enormous penalties.” Id., at 145. Because the railroad officers and employees “could not be expected to disobey any of the provisions … at the risk of such fines and penalties,” the law effectively resulted in “a denial of any hearing to the company.” Id., at 146.

The Court unequivocally rejected this design. Concluding that the legislature could not “preclude a resort to the courts … for the purpose of testing [the law’s] validity,” the Court decided the companies could obtain pre-enforcement relief by suing the Minnesota attorney general based on his “connection with the enforcement” of the challenged act. Id., at 146, 157. The Court so held despite the fact that the attorney general’s only such connection was the “general duty imposed upon him, which includes the right and the power to enforce the statutes of the State, including, of course, the act in question.” Id., at 161. Over the years, “the Young doctrine has been accepted as necessary to permit the federal courts to vindicate federal rights and hold state officials responsible to ‘the supreme authority of the United States.’ ” Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, 465 U. S. 89, 105 (1984) (quoting Young, 209 U. S., at 160); accord, e.g., Virginia Office for Protection and Advocacy v. Stewart, 563 U. S. 247, 254–255 (2011).

Like the stockholders in Young, abortion providers face calamitous liability from a facially unconstitutional law. To be clear, the threat is not just the possibility of money judgments; it is also that, win or lose, providers may be forced to defend themselves against countless suits, all across the State, without any prospect of recovery for their losses or expenses. Here, as in Young, the “practical effect of [these] coercive penalties for noncompliance” is “to foreclose all access to the courts,” “a constitutionally intolerable choice.”