Page:Luna Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools.pdf/6

4 seeks relief for harms flowing from Sturgis’s alleged past shortcomings in providing a free and appropriate public education—a harm IDEA exists to address—and Mr. Perez chose to settle his administrative complaint rather than exhaust §1415(f) and (g)’s remedial processes.

If both views are plausible ones, we believe Mr. Perez’s better comports with the statute’s terms. Start with §1415(l)’s first clause. It focuses our attention on “remedies.” A “remedy” denotes “the means of enforcing a right,” and may come in the form of, say, money damages, an injunction, or a declaratory judgment. Black’s Law Dictionary 1320 (8th ed. 2004); see also 13 Oxford English Dictionary 584–585 (2d ed. 1991) (defining “remedy” as “[l]egal redress”). The statute then proceeds to instruct that “[n]othing” in IDEA shall be construed as “restrict[ing] or limit[ing]” the availability of any of these things “under” other federal statutes like the ADA.

Of course, §1415(l) carves out an exception to this rule. The second clause bars individuals from “seeking relief” under other federal laws unless they first exhaust “the procedures under subsections (f) and (g).” But, by its terms, this limiting language does not apply to all suits seeking relief that other federal laws provide. The statute’s administrative exhaustion requirement applies only to suits that “see[k] relief … also available under” IDEA. And that condition simply is not met in situations like ours, where a plaintiff brings a suit under another federal law for compensatory damages—a form of relief everyone agrees IDEA does not provide.

Admittedly, our interpretation treats “remedies” (the key term in the first clause) as synonymous with the “relief” a plaintiff “seek[s]” (the critical phrase found in the second clause). But a number of contextual clues persuade us that is exactly how an ordinary reader would understand this particular provision. Not only does §1415(l) begin by