Excerpts From Court’s Ruling

Quotes from the Supreme Court ruling that a Mexican immigrant could not claim that Alabama’s English-only policy was unfair to racial or ethnic minorities.

From the majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia and joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor:

Statutes that focus on the person regulated rather than the individuals protected create “no implication of an intent to confer rights on a particular class of persons.”

Language in a regulation may invoke a private right of action that Congress through statutory text created, but it may not create a right that Congress has not.

But it is most certainly incorrect to say that language in a regulation can conjure up a private cause of action that has not been authorized by Congress. Agencies may play the sorcerer’s apprentice but not the sorcerer himself.

Neither as originally enacted nor as later amended does Title VI display an intent to create a freestanding private right of action to enforce regulations. . . . We therefore hold that no such right of action exists.

From the dissenting opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter:

Today, in a decision unfounded in our precedent and hostile to decades of settled expectations, a majority of this Court carves out an important exception to the right of private action long recognized under Title VI.

Underlying the majority’s dismissive treatment of our prior cases is a flawed understanding of the structure of Title VI. . . .

Overwrought imagery aside, it is the majority’s approach that blinds itself to congressional intent.

Given the prevailing consensus in the Courts of Appeals, the Court should have declined to take this case.