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HEALTH AND HOSPITAL CORPORATION OF MARION 
CTY. v. TALEVSKI 
Syllabus 

only some of the laws.  Maine v. Thiboutot, 448 U. S. 1, 6.  Looking to 
history, HHC attempts to sow doubt about §1983’s textually unquali-
fied sweep, and proffers a Spending Clause-based argument to narrow
§1983’s  meaning.    But  a  fuller  picture  of  the  relevant  history  lends 
HHC no aid. 

The Court is unpersuaded by HHC’s argument that, because Con-
gress  seems  to  have  enacted  the  FNHRA  pursuant  to  the  Spending
Clause, Talevski cannot invoke §1983 to vindicate rights recognized by
the FNHRA.  HHC starts with the Court’s observation that federal leg-
islation premised on the Spending Clause power is “much in the nature
of a contract,” Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, 451 
U. S. 1, 17.  From there, HHC argues that Spending Clause statutes 
may  not  be  enforced  via  §1983  because  contracts  were not  generally
enforceable by third-party beneficiaries at when §1983 was enacted in
the 1870s.  The Court rejects HHC’s argument.  First, while the Court 
has reasoned that Congress’s failure to displace firmly rooted common-
law  principles  generally  indicates  that  it  incorporated  those  estab-
lished  principles  into  §1983,  Wyatt  v.  Cole,  504  U.  S.  158,  163–164, 
HHC’s  key  common-law  plank  here—that  third-party  beneficiaries 
could  not  sue  to  enforce  contractual  obligations  during  the  relevant
time—is, at a minimum, contestable.  “[S]omething more than ‘ambig-
uous  historical  evidence’  is  required  [to]  ‘flatly  overrule a  number  of
major  decisions  of  this  Court,’ ”  Gamble  v.  United  States,  587  U. S. 
___, ___.  Second, because “[t]here is no doubt that the cause of action 
created by §1983 is, and was always regarded as, a tort claim,” Monte-
rey v. Del Monte Dunes at Monterey, Ltd., 526 U. S. 687, 727 (Scalia, 
J.,  concurring  in  part  and  concurring  in  judgment),  HHC’s  focus  on 
1870s  law  governing  third-party-beneficiary  suits  in  contract  is  per-
plexing, and HHC offers no reason those principles should be read to
displace the plain scope of “laws” in §1983.  Pp. 5–10.

(b) Under  the  Court’s  precedent,  the  FNHRA  provisions  at  issue 
here unambiguously confer individual federal rights enforceable under 
§1983, and the Court discerns no intent by Congress in FNHRA to pre-
clude private enforcement of these rights under §1983.  Pp. 11–23. 

(1) Although federal statutes have the potential to create §1983-
enforceable rights, they do so under this Court’s precedents only when 
the statute unambiguously confers those rights.  The Court has recog-
nized that the typical remedy for noncompliance with a federal statute
enacted pursuant to the Spending Clause is not a private cause of ac-
tion for noncompliance but  rather termination of funds to the State. 
See Gonzaga Univ. v. Doe, 536 U. S. 273, 280.  The parties here thus 
dispute whether this is the atypical case; that is, whether the unnec-
essary-restraint  and  predischarge-notice  provisions  of  the  FNHRA