Opinion of the Court
13. On this basis alone, HHC thus, in effect, urges us to reject decades of precedent, and to rewrite §1983’s plain text to read “laws (unless those laws rest on the Spending Power).”
Two well-established principles, applied here, suffice to reject HHC’s invitation to reimagine Congress’s handiwork (and our precedent interpreting it).
First, our prior §1983 cases reference “ ‘firmly rooted’ ” common-law principles. Wyatt v. Cole, 504 U. S. 158, 164 (1992). We implement Congress’s choices rather than remake them. Azar v. Allina Health Services, 587 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2019) (slip op., at 14–15). Thus, we have reasoned that Congress’s failure to displace firmly rooted common-law principles generally indicates that it incorporated those established principles into §1983. Wyatt, 504 U. S., at 163–164.[1] Here, HHC’s key common-law plank—that third-party beneficiaries could not sue to enforce contractual obligations during the relevant time—is, at a minimum, contestable. See Brief for Contract Law Professors et al. as Amici Curiae 4 (“[A] majority of American jurisdictions … permit[ted] third-party beneficiaries to sue through at least the early 1870s”); see also Hendrick v. Lindsay, 93 U. S. 143, 149 (1876) (concluding that “the right of a party to
- ↑ For example, we have recognized immunities in the §1983 context when a “ ‘tradition of immunity was so firmly rooted in the common law and was supported by such strong policy reasons that “Congress would have specifically so provided had it wished to abolish” ’ ” that particular immunity. Wyatt, 504 U. S., at 164 (quoting Owen v. Independence, 445 U. S. 622, 637 (1980)); see also Tenney v. Brandhove, 341 U. S. 367, 372–376 (1951) (rooting immunity in a well-settled, pre-Revolutionary tradition that Congress could not be thought to have “covert[ly]” abrogated). We relied on similar reasoning when consulting well-settled common-law principles to determine the “contours of a [§1983] claim,” Nieves v. Bartlett, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 12), the accrual date for §1983 claims, McDonough v. Smith, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 5) (citing, inter alia, Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U. S. 477, 483 (1994)), and “prerequisites for th[e] recovery” of monetary damages, id., at 483 (citing Carey v. Piphus, 435 U. S. 247, 257–258 (1978)).
