Judge James D. Hopkins' service to society and to the legal community was a shining example of the life one should live in the law. At the time of his retirement from the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court in December, 1981, he had served with distinction at the highest level of all three branches of the Westchester County Government: legislative, executive and judicial.

A lifelong resident of Westchester County, Judge Hopkins began his legal career as an associate with Strang & Taylor and later became partner of Bleakley, Platt and Walker, now known as Bleakley Platt & Schmidt. In 1954, he became County Executive of Westchester County following a one-year term as majority leader of the Westchester County Board of Supervisors which he also served as Chairman from 1952_1953. Judge
Hopkins was Councilman and later Town Supervisor of the Town of North Castle. On appointment by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Judge Hopkins served on the New York State Supreme Court, 9th Judicial District, a post to which he was subsequently elected, in 1960, for a 14_year term. He joined the Appellate Division, Second Department, in 1962.

Synopsis of Professor Doernberg's Lecture:

The United States was a political experiment at its formation, and it still is. The introduction of a federal system required constant active balancing of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The colonies' experience under the British Crown made them extraordinarily suspicious of centralized governmental power, but the new states' experience under the Articles of Confederation demonstrated that too weak a centralized power could not be an effective government in a large nation. Our federal system is the result of those two unsatisfactory experiences.

The new dual sovereignty system required some modifications in the concept of sovereign immunity. Moreover, the underlying political philosophy concept that the people created the government to serve their needs (derived largely, though not exclusively, from John Locke) also represented a different attitude toward sovereign immunity. Those ideas intertwined to produce a concept of federalism that is remarkably complex.

We uniformly recognize that states have many of the attributes of traditional sovereignty. The Tenth Amendment is but one indication of that recognition. On the other hand, the Supremacy Clause necessarily presents a serious challenge to state sovereign immunity. To what extent are the states subject to federal law enacted pursuant to Congress's Article I powers? To what extent does state sovereign immunity limit Congress's powers under Article I?

Over the last three decades, the Supreme Court has undertaken a major redefinition of the balance between state and federal power. Much, but certainly not all of that work involves the Eleventh Amendment, which ostensibly limits only the federal courts' ability to hear cases brought by out-of-state individuals against state defendants but in reality has come to mean a great deal more. Since the mid-1980s, the Court has told Congress on numerous occasions that it cannot effectively regulate state behavior, or at least that it cannot enlist the help of the federal judiciary (and sometimes the state judiciary) in doing so. The most recent example came last Term, when the Court relied on the Eleventh Amendment effectively to exempt states from compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Underlying these complex ideas is the concept of the rule of law. What exactly do we mean by that oft-repeated and deceptively simple expression? How does the rule of law function with respect to a government created on the philosophical foundations of ours? In that context, does it have anything to say to us about the nature of sovereignty? Does it inform at all the continuing struggle that our system of dual sovereignty guarantees?