Galette v. New Jersey Transit Corp. · ¶3
Colt et al., on certiorari to the Court of Appeals of New York. (a) Sovereign immunity is “ `personal' ” to the State and extends only to arms of the State itself, College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd., 527 U. S. 666, 675, not to legally independent entities that the State creates. Whether an entity is “an arm of the State . . . is a question of federal law” answered by considering the “provisions of state law that define the agency's character.” Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Doe, 519 U. S. 425, 429, n. 5. Pp. 519–523. (1) The Court's early cases focused on whether an entity was a separate legal person from the State, with the corporate form serving as a key marker of separate legal personhood. A “corporation” was understood as “an artificial person” that could “sue and be sued by its own members” and “contract with them . . . as with any strangers.”…Read in context ›
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