California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from Mandel v. Myers, 174 Cal.Rptr. 841, 29 Cal.3d 531 (Cal. 1981):
The plaintiffs in this case originally sued under the freedom of religion clauses of the federal and state Constitutions. (Mandel v. Hodges, supra, 54 Cal.App.3d at pp. 610-619, 127 Cal.Rptr. 244.) The state was not entitled to immunity from suit under those provisions. If immunity from suit for the substantive constitutional violations did not exist, why should the remedy for those violations be barred by another tenet of the state immunity principle? Once it has been established that the state does not have immunity from legal suit and the resulting liability, on what conceivable basis may the state be completely exempted from fulfilling its legal obligation to pay that judgment?
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