-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199712291511.JAA01429@einstein.ssz.com>, on 12/29/97 at 09:11 AM, Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com> said:
Forwarded message:
From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@invweb.net> Date: Mon, 29 Dec 97 08:32:34 -0600 Subject: Re: constitution.amendmentxi.html (fwd)
Of note is that this amendment *only* covers cases where a citizen sues a *single* state, not 49 of them.
There is no Constitutional rule that covers the process between a individual and more than a single state. It simply ain't there.
Well considering that the Constitution is a *limiting* document, if the powers are not explicitly given to the Federal Government they don't have them.
Soooo, in the case of a citizen sues multiple states the Federal Government still has no juristiction as they have never explicitly been given that power.
So what you are saying, though I doubt you realize it, is that a citizen *can't* sue 2 or more states as a group. They *must* sue singly and in the individual state courts.
Of course, this isn't explicity described either, so where does this authority come from?
- From the laws and Constitutions of the individule states.
This means there is no way to sue states as a group for their actions in regards to relations to the federal government. So the federal government can require the states to do all kinds of things and I as a citizen and effected by those actions can't sue the states but only the federal government.
Interesting hole. I wonder if it will hold up.
Well you can only sue the state that has caused some form of direct damage against you. If both Texas and Alaska are doing somthing Unconstitutional but Texas is the only one who has directly caused damage then you should only be able to sue Texas. Even if Alaska is doing the exact same thing unless they have directly caused damage against you there is no basis to included them as a party in your suit. There will be exceptions to this and one may very well have to sue each state in it's own courts if you have greviances with more than one State. I think that in the majority of cases one will find that a greviance will be limited to a single state (I think it would be very rare to find a case where all 50 states had directly caused damage against an individule). An example of this would be back in the 50's with the forced segregation laws. If you were living in Georga and wished to bring suit against the state for violating your rights you would be limited to only suing Georga even though AL,FL,SC,NC,TX,AR, all had the same laws on the books. Now you could travel to each of those states and then have greviances against each one but each greviance would be independent of each other and require seperate suits against them. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a-sha1 Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNKfDVI9Co1n+aLhhAQFx/QP+KaQV0oWAYFzDM6+aByiHUrNWq4m7URMx QgJEbDVZaa0NdRQ2wzV9kGlBGpxXzag6Z1e6GDiPA8m/0j+Rj/TTgLw/WxgiIcL6 D7fwtBqftQbB8AlAmgZIS4k3UOpL88mANs3veMBWM/QJWIoMN2S+t1T/pdKzwn4d Hp2oMqCUohg= =5MsM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----