Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-806_2dp3.pdf
Page Number: 13

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

9 

Opinion of the Court 

13.  On  this  basis  alone,  HHC  thus,  in  effect,  urges  us  to
reject decades of precedent, and to rewrite §1983’s plain text 
to  read  “laws  (unless  those  laws  rest  on  the  Spending
Power).”

Two  well-established  principles,  applied  here,  suffice  to 
reject HHC’s invitation to reimagine Congress’s handiwork 
(and our precedent interpreting it). 

First,  our  prior  §1983  cases  reference  “ ‘firmly  rooted’ ” 
common-law principles.  Wyatt v. Cole, 504 U. S. 158, 164 
(1992).  We implement Congress’s choices rather than re-
make them.  Azar v. Allina Health Services, 587 U. S. ___, 
___–___ (2019) (slip op., at 14–15).  Thus, we have reasoned 
that  Congress’s  failure  to  displace  firmly  rooted  common-
law principles generally indicates that it incorporated those 
established principles into §1983.  Wyatt, 504 U. S., at 163– 
164.6   Here,  HHC’s  key  common-law  plank—that  third-
party beneficiaries could not sue to enforce contractual ob-
ligations during the relevant time—is, at a minimum, con-
testable.  See  Brief  for  Contract  Law  Professors  et al.  as 
Amici Curiae 4 (“[A] majority of American jurisdictions . . . 
permit[ted] third-party beneficiaries to sue through at least 
the  early  1870s”);  see  also  Hendrick  v.  Lindsay,  93  U. S. 
143,  149  (1876)  (concluding  that  “the  right  of  a  party  to 
—————— 

6 For  example,  we  have  recognized  immunities  in  the  §1983  context 
when a “ ‘tradition of immunity was so firmly rooted in the common law 
and was supported by such strong policy reasons that “Congress would
have specifically so provided had it wished to abolish” ’ ” that particular 
immunity.  Wyatt, 504 U. S., at 164 (quoting Owen v. Independence, 445 
U. S. 622, 637 (1980)); see also Tenney v. Brandhove, 341 U. S. 367, 372– 
376 (1951) (rooting immunity in a well-settled, pre-Revolutionary tradi-
tion that Congress could not be thought to have “covert[ly]” abrogated).
We relied on similar reasoning when consulting well-settled common-law 
principles to determine the “contours of a [§1983] claim,” Nieves v. Bart-
lett, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 12), the accrual date for §1983 
claims,  McDonough  v.  Smith,  588  U. S.  ___,  ___  (2019)  (slip  op.,  at  5) 
(citing,  inter  alia,  Heck  v.  Humphrey,  512  U. S.  477,  483  (1994)),  and
“prerequisites for th[e] recovery” of monetary damages, id., at 483 (citing 
Carey v. Piphus, 435 U. S. 247, 257–258 (1978)).