Allen v. Cooper
U.S. Supreme Court · decided March 23, 2020 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Decided
- March 23, 2020
- Term
- October Term 2019
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Kagan
- Issue area
- Federalism
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
- Constitutional ruling
- Federal law held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice KAGAN delivered the opinion of the Court. In two basically identical statutes passed in the early 1990s, Congress sought to strip the States of their sovereign immunity from patent and copyright infringement suits. Not long after, this Court held in Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd. v. College Savings Bank , 527 U.S. 627, 119 S.Ct. 2199, 144 L.Ed.2d 575 (1999), that the patent statute lacked a valid constitutional basis. Today, we take up the copyright statute. We find that our decision in Florida Prepaid compels the same conclusion. I In 1717, the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, captured a French slave ship in the West Indies and renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge . The vessel became his flagship. Carrying some 40 cannons and 300 men, the Revenge took many prizes as she sailed around the Caribbean and up the North American coast. But her reign over those seas was short-lived. In 1718, the ship ran aground on a sandbar a mile off Beaufort, North Carolina. Blackbeard and most of his crew escaped without harm. Not so the Revenge . She sank beneath the waters, where she lay undisturbed for nearly 300 years. In 1996, a marine salvage company named Intersal, Inc., discovered the shipwreck. Under federal and state law, the wreck belongs to North Carolina. See 102 Stat. 433, 43 U.S.C. § 2105(c) ; N.C. Gen. Stat. Ann. § 121-22 (2019). But the State…
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