338
Opinion of the Court
ates no individual rights enforceable under § 1983. The District Court treated this motion as one for summary judgment and ruled in favor of the Director. Relying primarily on a decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Carelli v. Howser, 923 F. 2d 1208 (1991), the District Court held that Congress had foreclosed private actions to enforce Title IV-D by authorizing the Secretary to audit and cut off funds to States with programs that do not substantially comply with Title IV-D's requirements.
A divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed. 68 F. 3d 1141 (1995). The majority identified the three principal factors this Court has used to determine whether a statute creates a privately enforceable right: whether the plaintiff is one of the "intended beneficiaries of the statute," whether the plaintiffs' asserted interests are not so " 'vague and amorphous' as to be 'beyond the competence of the judiciary to enforce,' " and whether the statute imposes a binding obligation on the State. Id., at 1147 (quoting Wilder v. Virginia Hospital Assn., 496 U. S. 498, 509 (1990)). Title IV-D, the Court of Appeals held, satisfied each of these criteria. First, "needy families with children" were the intended beneficiaries of Title IV-D. 68 F. 3d, at 1150. Second, the majority held that the "plaintiffs' asserted interest is not vague or amorphous, and it is sufficiently concrete to be judicially enforceable" because whether a State delivers the services required by Title IV-D "to the degree required by law is judicially ascertainable." Id., at 1149-1150. Finally, the Court of Appeals stated that the statute imposes binding obligations because a State must satisfy each of the requirements spelled out in Title IV-D in order to receive AFDC funding. Although the majority acknowledged that the requirement that a State remain in "substantial compliance" with its plan might seem ambiguous when divorced from context, the majority believed that the "highly detailed requirements" of the statute and its imple-
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