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Text: We turn first to the contention that Florida's sovereign immunity was validly abrogated. Our decision three Terms ago in Seminole Tribe, supra, held that the power "to regulate Commerce" conferred by Article I of the Constitution gives Congress no authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity. As authority for the abrogation in the present case, petitioner relies upon § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which we held in Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, supra, and reaffirmed in Seminole Tribe, see 517 U.S., at 72-73, could be used for that purpose.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall "deprive any person of . . . property . . . without due process of law." Section 5 provides that "[t]he Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." We made clear in City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 516-529 (1997), that the term "enforce" is to be taken seriously_x0097_that the object of valid § 5 legislation must be the carefully delimited remediation or prevention of constitutional violations. Petitioner claims that, with respect to § 43(a) of the Lanham Act, Congress enacted the TRCA to remedy and prevent state deprivations without due process of two species of "property" rights: (1) a right to be free from a business competitor's false advertising about its own product, and (2) a more generalized right to be secure in one's business interests. Neither of these qualifies as a property right protected by the Due Process Clause.

As to the first: The hallmark of a protected property interest is the right to exclude others. That is "one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property." Kaiser Aetna v. United States, 444 U.S. 164, 176 (1979). That is why the right that we all possess to use the public lands is not the "property" right of anyone_x0097_hence the sardonic maxim, explaining what economists call the "tragedy of the commons,"[1]res publica, res nullius. The Lanham Act may well contain provisions that protect constitutionally cognizable property interests_x0097_notably, its provisions dealing with infringement of trademarks, which are the "property" of the owner because he can exclude others from using them. See, e. g., K mart Corp. v. Cartier, Inc., 485 U.S. 176, 185-186 (1988) ("Trademark law, like contract law, confers private rights, which are themselves rights of exclusion. It grants the trademark owner a bundle of such rights"). The Lanham Act's false-advertising provisions, however, bear no relationship to any right to exclude; and Florida Prepaid's alleged misrepresentations concerning its own products intruded upon no interest over which petitioner had exclusive dominion.

Unsurprisingly, petitioner points to no decision of this Court (or of any other court, for that matter) recognizing a property right in freedom from a competitor's false advertising about its own products. The closest petitioner comes is dicta in International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 236 (1918), where the Court found equity jurisdiction over an unfair-competition claim because "[t]he rule that a court of equity concerns itself only in the protection of property rights treats any civil right of a pecuniary nature as a property right." But to say that a court of equity "treats any civil right of a pecuniary nature as a property right" is not to say that all civil rights of a pecuniary nature are property rights. In fact, when one reads the full passage from which this statement is taken it is clear that the Court was saying just the opposite, namely, that equity will treat civil rights of a pecuniary nature as property rights even though they are properly not such:

"In order to sustain the jurisdiction of equity over the controversy, we need not affirm any general and absolute property in the news as such. The rule that a court of equity concerns itself only in the protection of property rights treats any civil right of a pecuniary nature as a property right . . . ; and the right to acquire property by honest labor or the conduct of a lawful business is as much entitled to protection as the right to guard property already acquired. . . . It is this right that furnishes the basis of the jurisdiction in the ordinary case of unfair competition." Id., at 236-237.
We may also note that the unfair competition at issue in International News Service amounted to nothing short of theft of proprietary information, something in which a power to "exclude others" could be said to exist. See id., at 233.

Petitioner argues that the common-law tort of unfair competition "by definition" protects property interests, Brief for Petitioner 15, and thus the TRCA "by definition" is designed to remedy and prevent deprivations of such interests in the false-advertising context. Even as a logical matter, that does not follow, since not everything which protects property interests is designed to remedy or prevent deprivations of those property interests. A municipal ordinance prohibiting billboards in residential areas protects the property interests of homeowners, although erecting billboards would ordinarily not deprive them of property. To sweep within the Fourteenth Amendment the elusive property interests that are "by definition" protected by unfair-competition law would violate our frequent admonition that the Due Process Clause is not merely a "font of tort law." Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 701 (1976).

Petitioner's second assertion of a property interest rests upon an argument similar to the one just discussed, and suffers from the same flaw. Petitioner argues that businesses are "property" within the meaning of the Due Process Clause, and that Congress legislates under § 5 when it passes a law that prevents state interference with business (which false advertising does). Brief for Petitioner 19-20. The assets of a business (including its good will) unquestionably are property, and any state taking of those assets is unquestionably a "deprivation" under the Fourteenth Amendment. But business in the sense of the activity of doing business, or the activity of making a profit is not property in the ordinary sense_x0097_and it is only that, and not any business asset, which is impinged upon by a competitor's false advertising.

Finding that there is no deprivation of property at issue here, we need not pursue the follow-on question that City of Boerne would otherwise require us to resolve: whether the prophylactic measure taken under purported authority of § 5 (viz., prohibition of States' sovereign-immunity claims, which are not in themselves violations of the Fourteenth Amendment) was genuinely necessary to prevent violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. We turn next to the question whether Florida's sovereign immunity, though not abrogated, was voluntarily waived.