Cite as: 532 U. S. 275 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
als could not recover compensatory damages under Title VI except for intentional discrimination. Five Justices in addition voted to uphold the disparate-impact regulations (four would have declared them invalid, see 463 U. S., at 611, n. 5 (Powell, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 612-614 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment)), but of those five, three expressly reserved the question of a direct private right of action to enforce the regulations, saying that "[w]hether a cause of action against private parties exists directly under the regulations . . . [is a] questio[n] that [is] not presented by this case." Id., at 645, n. 18 (Stevens, J., dissenting).3 Thus, only two Justices had cause to reach the issue
the distinction we draw between disparate-impact and intentional discrimination was "wholly foreign" to that opinion, see post, at 297. Cannon, however, was decided less than one year after the Court in Bakke had drawn precisely that distinction with respect to Title VI, see supra, at 280-281, and it is absurd to think that Cannon meant, without discussion, to ban under Title IX the very disparate-impact discrimination that Bakke said Title VI permitted. The only discussion in Cannon of Title IX's scope is found in Justice Powell's dissenting opinion, which simply assumed that the conclusion that Title IX would be limited to intentional discrimination was "forgone in light of our holding" in Bakke. Cannon v. University of Chicago, 441 U. S. 677, 748, n. 19 (1979). The dissent's additional claim that Cannon provided a private right of action for "all the discrimination prohibited by the regulatory scheme contained in Title IX," post, at 297-298, n. 4 (emphasis added), simply begs the question at the heart of this case, which is whether a right of action to enforce disparate-impact regulations must be independently identified, see infra, at 284-286.
3 We of course accept the statement by the author of the dissent that he "thought" at the time of Guardians that disparate-impact regulations could be enforced "in an implied action against private parties," post, at 301, n. 6. But we have the better interpretation of what our colleague wrote in Guardians. In the closing section of his opinion, Justice Stevens concluded that because respondents in that case had "violated the petitioners' rights under [the] regulations . . . [t]he petitioners were therefore entitled to the compensation they sought under 42 U. S. C. § 1983 and were awarded by the District Court." 463 U. S., at 645. The passage omits any mention of a direct private right of action to enforce the regulations, and the footnote we have quoted in text—which appears immedi-
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