TENNESSEE v. LANE
Opinion of the Court
V
The only question that remains is whether Title II is an
appropriate response to this history and pattern of unequal
treatment. At the outset, we must determine the scope of
that inquiry. Title II-unlike RFRA, the Patent Remedy
Act, and the other statutes we have reviewed for validity
under §5-reaches a wide array of official conduct in an
effort to enforce an equally wide array of constitutional
guarantees. Petitioner urges us both to examine the broad
range of Title II's applications all at once, and to treat
that breadth as a mark of the law's invalidity. According to
petitioner, the fact that Title II applies not only to public
education and voting-booth access but also to seating at
state-owned hockey rinks indicates that Title II is not appropriately tailored to serve its objectives. But nothing in our
case law requires us to consider Title II, with its wide variety of applications, as an undifferentiated whole.18 Whatever might be said about Title II's other applications, the
question presented in this case is not whether Congress can
18 Contrary to THE CHIEF JUSTICE, post, at 551-552, neither Garrettnor
Florida Prepaid lends support to the proposition that the Boerne test
requires courts in all cases to "measur[e] the full breadth of the statute or
relevant provision that Congress enacted against the scope of the constitutional right it purported to enforce." In fact, the decision in Garrett,
which severed Title I of the ADA from Title II for purposes of the §5
inquiry, demonstrates that courts need not examine "the full breadth of
the statute" all at once. Moreover, Garrett and FloridaPrepaid,like all
of our other recent § 5 cases, concerned legislation that narrowly targeted
the enforcement of a single constitutional right; for that reason, neither
speaks to the issue presented in this case.
Nor is THE CHIEF JUSTICE's approach compelled by the nature of the
Boerne inquiry. The answer to the question Boerne asks-whether a
piece of legislation attempts substantively to redefine a constitutional
guarantee-logically focuses on the manner in which the legislation operates to enforce that particular guarantee. It is unclear what, if anything,
examining Title II's application to hockey rinks or voting booths can tell
us about whether Title II substantively redefines the right of access to
the courts.