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524US1

Unit: $U83

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212 PENNSYLVANIA DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS v. YESKEY

Opinion of the Court

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areas as .
institutionalization,” § 12101(a)(3), can be
thought to include penal institutions. But assuming it to be
true, and assuming further that it proves, as petitioners con-
tend, that Congress did not “envisio[n] that the ADA would
be applied to state prisoners,” Brief for Petitioners 13–14,
in the context of an unambiguous statutory text that is irrel-
evant. As we have said before, the fact that a statute can
be “ ‘applied in situations not expressly anticipated by Con-
It demonstrates
gress does not demonstrate ambiguity.
breadth.’ ” Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479,
499 (1985) (citation omitted).

Our conclusion that the text of the ADA is not ambiguous
causes us also to reject petitioners’ appeal to the doctrine of
constitutional doubt, which requires that we interpret stat-
utes to avoid “grave and doubtful constitutional questions,”
United States ex rel. Attorney General v. Delaware & Hud-
son Co., 213 U. S. 366, 408 (1909). That doctrine enters in
only “where a statute is susceptible of two constructions,”
ibid. And for the same reason we disregard petitioners’ in-
vocation of the statute’s title, “Public Services,” 104 Stat.
“[T]he title of a statute . . . cannot limit the plain mean-
337.
ing of the text. For interpretive purposes, [it is] of use only
when [it] shed[s] light on some ambiguous word or phrase.”
Trainmen v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 331 U. S. 519, 528–
529 (1947).

We do not address another issue presented by petitioners:
whether application of the ADA to state prisons is a constitu-
tional exercise of Congress’s power under either the Com-
merce Clause, compare Printz v. United States, 521 U. S. 898
(1997), with Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit
Authority, 469 U. S. 528 (1985), or § 5 of the Fourteenth
Amendment, see City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U. S. 507
(1997). Petitioners raise this question in their brief, see
Brief for Petitioners 22–23, but it was addressed by neither
the District Court nor the Court of Appeals, where petition-
“Where
ers raised only the Gregory plain-statement issue.