The Legal Power of ‘Standing’ / Zivotofsky v. Kerry
The Legal Power of ‘Standing’
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/opinion/the-legal-power-of-standing.html?_r=0&referrer=
CHICAGO — It just goes to show the importance of jurisdiction. Recently, the Supreme Court added a new case to its docket for next year, Spokeo v. Robins, which is about a technical question of jurisdiction — when a plaintiff has “standing” to sue in federal court. But the court’s decision to hear a case on that technical issue may have the surprising effect of causing the court to postpone its ruling in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, a major case about separation of powers and foreign affairs that the court is expected to decide any day now.
The new case, Spokeo, is a lawsuit under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. A man named Thomas Robins complains that Spokeo, an online data service, got some of his information wrong, which could be a violation of the law. Mr. Robins sued (and also sought to represent a class) under the act, which promises up to $1,000 for each violation.
But here’s the rub: Most of the errors made by the listing service seem favorable to Mr. Robins; and while he disagrees, the trial court was skeptical that Mr. Robins had in fact been harmed. This implicates the question of standing, for the Supreme Court’s precedents have held that to bring a federal lawsuit you need to be seeking a remedy for an imminent or actual injury.
The big dispute is over what kind of injury is required. Supporters of this kind of suit say that this choice is up to Congress. If Congress creates a new legal right, it can let people sue to enforce it. That’s just part of Congress’s ability to ensure that new statutes, such as environmental and consumer-protection laws, are widely enforced and therefore widely obeyed. But skeptics say that this kind of suit circumvents the constitutional structure. If the infringement of anything Congress calls a “right” counts as an injury, then Congress can basically fill the courts with cases in which nothing concrete is at stake.
Standing and causes of action in Zivotofsky
justsecurity.org - As a nerdy follow-on to Bob’s excellent guest post on the Zivotofsky case (which could prove to be the most significant foreign affairs case that the Supreme Court has heard in some time) ...
http://ppr.li/r?trail=contributor%3Dtwitter%3A380268462&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjustsecurity.org%2F9864%2Fstanding-action-zivotofsky%2F&urlhash=338d39e7