Essay

Pennhurst, Chevron, and the Spending Power

110 Yale L.J. 1187 (2001)

Narrowly construed, Pennhurst is a sensible (even if not necessary) process-based limitation on Congress's power to bind states to costly burdens. If read to mean that a state can never be bound by a grant condition when the statute itself does not unmistakably speak to a pa…