Volume 599 U. S. Part 1 Pages 166–235

OFFICIAL REPORTS OF

THE SUPREME COURT June 8, 2023

Page Proof Pending Publication

REBECCA A. WOMELDORF reporter of decisions

NOTICE: This preliminary print is subject to formal revision before the bound volume is published. Users are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D.C. 20543, pio@supremecourt.gov, of any typographical or other formal errors. 166 OCTOBER TERM, 2022

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HEALTH AND HOSPITAL CORPORATION OF MARION COUNTY et al. v. TALEVSKI, as personal repre- sentative of the ESTATE OF TALEVSKI certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the seventh circuit No. 21–806. Argued November 8, 2022—Decided June 8, 2023 After Gorgi Talevski's move to a nursing home in 2016 proved problematic, Talevski (through his wife Ivanka) brought an action under 42 U. S. C. § 1983 against a county-owned nursing home and its agents (collectively, HHC), claiming that HHC's treatment of Talevski violated rights guar- anteed him under the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act (FNHRA). The District Court granted HHC's subsequent motion to dismiss Talev- ski's complaint, reasoning that no plaintiff can enforce provisions of the FNHRA via § 1983. The Seventh Circuit reversed, concluding that the rights referred to in two FNHRA provisions invoked by Talevski—the right to be free from unnecessary chemical restraints, see § 1396r(c)(1) (A)(ii), and rights to be discharged or transferred only when certain Page Proof Pending Publication preconditions are met, see § 1396r(c)—“unambiguously confer individu- ally enforceable rights on nursing-home residents,” making those rights presumptively enforceable via § 1983. 6 F. 4th 713, 720. The Seventh Circuit further found nothing in the FNHRA to indicate congressional intent to foreclose § 1983 enforcement. Held: The FNHRA provisions at issue unambiguously create § 1983- enforceable rights, and the Court discerns no incompatibility between private enforcement under § 1983 and the remedial scheme that Con- gress devised. Pp. 174–192. (a) Section 1983 has, since the 1870s, provided an express cause of action to any person deprived (by someone acting under color of state law) of “any rights . . . secured by the Constitution and laws.” The Court has long refused to read § 1983's unmodifed term “laws” to mean 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- fed 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 Congress 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 legis- lation premised on the Spending Clause power is “much in the nature Cite as: 599 U. S. 166 (2023) 167

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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 benefciaries 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 frmly rooted common- law principles generally indicates that it incorporated those established principles into § 1983, Wyatt v. Cole, 504 U. S. 158, 163–164, HHC's key common-law plan