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LUNA PEREZ v. STURGIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS 

Opinion of the Court 

seeks  relief  for  harms  flowing  from  Sturgis’s  alleged  past 
shortcomings in providing a free and appropriate public ed-
ucation—a  harm  IDEA  exists  to  address—and  Mr.  Perez 
chose to settle his administrative complaint rather than ex-
haust §1415(f) and (g)’s remedial processes. 

If both views are plausible ones, we believe Mr. Perez’s
better  comports  with  the  statute’s  terms.  Start  with 
§1415(l)’s  first  clause.  It  focuses  our  attention  on  “reme-
dies.”  A “remedy” denotes “the means of enforcing a right,”
and may come in the form of, say, money damages, an in-
junction, or a declaratory judgment.  Black’s Law Diction-
ary 1320 (8th ed. 2004); see also 13 Oxford English Diction-
ary  584–585  (2d  ed.  1991)  (defining  “remedy”  as  “[l]egal
redress”).  The  statute  then  proceeds  to  instruct  that 
“[n]othing” in IDEA shall be construed as “restrict[ing] or 
limit[ing]”  the  availability  of  any  of  these  things  “under” 
other federal statutes like the ADA. 
  Of course, §1415(l) carves out an exception to this rule. 
The second clause bars individuals from “seeking relief” un-
der other federal laws unless they first exhaust “the proce-
dures under subsections (f) and (g).”  But, by its terms, this 
limiting language does not apply to all suits seeking relief 
that other federal laws provide.  The statute’s administra-
tive  exhaustion  requirement  applies  only  to  suits  that 
“see[k] relief . . . also available under” IDEA.  And that con-
dition  simply  is  not  met  in  situations  like  ours,  where  a 
plaintiff  brings  a  suit  under  another  federal  law  for  com-
pensatory damages—a form of relief everyone agrees IDEA 
does not provide.

Admittedly, our interpretation treats “remedies” (the key
term in the first clause) as synonymous with the “relief” a 
plaintiff  “seek[s]”  (the  critical  phrase  found  in  the  second 
clause).  But a number of contextual clues persuade us that 
is  exactly  how  an  ordinary  reader  would  understand  this
particular provision.  Not only does §1415(l) begin by direct-