Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-806_2dp3.pdf
Page Number: 12.0

8 

HEALTH AND HOSPITAL CORPORATION OF MARION 
CTY. v. TALEVSKI 
Opinion of the Court 

opinion)),  that  Talevski  cannot  invoke  §1983  to  vindicate 
the rights the FNHRA provisions at issue here purport to
recognize  because  Congress  seems  to  have  enacted  the
FNHRA pursuant to the spending power recognized in Ar-
ticle I, §8, of the Constitution.5 

HHC’s argument generally proceeds as follows.  Starting
with  our  precedent  regarding  Congress’s  spending 
power,   HHC  begins  by  emphasizing  our  observation  that 
federal legislation premised on that power is “much in the 
nature of a contract,” because, “in return for federal funds, 
the  States  agree  to  comply  with  federally  imposed  condi-
tions.”  Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, 
451 U. S. 1, 17 (1981); see also Cummings v. Premier Rehab 
Keller, 596 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (slip op., at 4).  HHC then 
seizes  on  the  “contract”  analogy  to  create  a  syllogism.  It 
reasons that (1) any private party suing to enforce an obli-
gation  between  Federal  and  State  Governments  that  a
Spending  Clause  statute  creates  is,  essentially,  a  “third-
party  beneficiary”  (by  which  HHC  means  beneficiaries  of
rights created in any such statute); and (2) under common-
law contract principles extant at the time that Congress en-
acted  §1983,  third-party  beneficiaries  were  “generally” 
barred from suing to enforce contract obligations; therefore, 
(3) plaintiffs like Talevski, as a purported third-party ben-
eficiary of the FNHRA, may not use §1983 to do something 
that  third-party  beneficiaries  of  contracts  generally  could
not do in the 1870s.  Brief for Petitioners 13, 17–18 (citing 
1870s treatises and state cases).

The upshot, for HHC, is that “Spending Clause statutes
do not give rise to privately enforceable rights under Sec-
tion 1983” because contracts were not “generally” enforcea-
ble by third-party beneficiaries at common law.  Id., at 11, 

—————— 

5 See  Art.  I,  §8,  cl. 1  (authorizing  the  Legislature  to  “lay  and  collect
Taxes . . . to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and gen-
eral Welfare of the United States”).