Standing to Sue: Basic Doctrine

i'm drew stevenson and this is a lecture for my administrative law class about the doctrine of standing it's one of the last chapters of our administrative law casebook and here i'm just going to be give a quick recap of the basic doctrine hopefully you learned about this in constitutional law as well and then i'm going to tell you about the twist that we have on this doctrine in administrative law keep in mind that this is also a bar exam subject as part of constitutional law and it comes up a lot in practice it's very clear and can seem like a simple concept in law school in practice the cases are really messy and a little bit unpredictable and khan law you may have learned this as a subset of just disability or which cases the courts actually can consider and the constitutional doctrine is really about who has standing to sue so always ask yourself that when we're talking about standing the question is who has standing who is the right person to be bringing this case or controversy before the court our classic formulation of standing has three prongs injury in fact causation or in modern cases we're talking about that the injury is traceable to the challenged conduct and whether it is redressable by the courts so if you've suffered an injury that the courts can't really do anything about then you don't have standing to sue most of the cases though really focus on this question of injury in fact if you don't know anything else about standing you really need to know these three prongs to get by and know the basics so when we talk about injury in fact let's unpack this a little bit in the luhan case which is in almost every administrative law case book and most constitutional law case books the supreme court said that an injury in fact it also has component parts it has to be concrete and particularized and actual or imminent so let's talk about each of those when we talk about a concrete injury we mean something that is real and quantifiable not just an idea or conceptual injury or something that you are morally offended by or in your indignant over something that happened and so we need to talk about like loss of revenue or loss of income or a physical injury show us your scars let us see the x-rays or it could be something like a loss of market share an inability to carry out your business like let's say during a shutdown order in a pandemic or restrictions on your right to travel so it can sometimes be something that's an indirect injury that indirectly affects you economic economically or in your business or your life or something like that but it can't just be something that you've found some conduct that someone did objectionable particularized means that the injury affects you in a special way it's not something that affects everybody kind of the same in the world or in your country or in your state but it affects some people more than others or some people especially or maybe only some people and you're one of those people when we say actual or imminent we mean it has happened or it's about to happen what we don't mean by actual imminent is something that may or may not happen at some unspecified time in the future and so the case uh in the lujan case uh the plaintiffs were thinking about taking a trip in the future to look at certain elephants and crocodiles overseas they didn't really have a concrete plan to do this yet or a date for their trip and so the court said that's not actual or imminent right that's just a maybe someday problem the same might be true if you're talking about merely a heightened risk of developing a medical condition or that now you used to know your risk and now it's uncertain you're not sure if you're safe or not and so that's going to be a little too unspecified in terms of the date when of injury for the court to want to do anything about it now in some recent cases the supreme court has started talking about how we also don't allow claims for generalized grievances personally i don't see how this is all that different from talking about a particularized harm but what they mean is you can't sue just because you think something is bad policy or it's bad for america it's bad for democracy it's bad for the country that's a generalized grievance that's supposed to be solved through the political process call your congressman vote on election day but don't ask the courts to just fix the world the way you want it okay let's move on when we talk about causation or whether an injury is traceable the verbiage that the supreme court has been using is that it's fairly traceable to the challenged conduct now i do want to warn you in practice this factor often blurs together either with the analysis of the injury or the discussion of whether the injury is redressable remember that in law we're not talking about scientific causation the way physicists do we're not talking about biology and medical causation or etiology as they would say in medical school we're talking often about who's blameworthy it's almost more like a morality tale or who should have to incur the costs or pay to remedy something and so forth and here the court that's part of why they've they're moving away from saying causation and talking about is this injury traceable to the challenged conduct in administrative law the challenge conduct is going to be the agency's conduct did the agency deny or revoke a permit or a license to the agency promulgate a regulation or announce a new rule or announce that they're not enforcing a particular regulation anymore something like that that we have an agency action or maybe inaction refusal to act and then we can trace that to the actual injury that you um that you suffered now when we talk about redressability the way the court has been talking about this is that it's likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision again note that in some cases when we're talking about whether you have a real concrete and particularized injury and so forth we're going to blur that together in a judicial opinion with the discussion about whether the courts can do anything about it do you have an injury that we can redress if not it might not be concrete and particularized so again in law school and for purposes of a test question you should keep these three things straight be prepared though when you're in practice as a lawyer that judges can kind of mix them all together and the same is to to get with mootness mootness is really a question of when to bring a claim you probably studied it in conjunction with conjunction with ripeness and so a claim that you're bringing too late it's too late for the court to do anything nothing the court can do is going to fix the problem for you that's moot but you can also see why some courts would then think that that creates a redressability problem and keep in mind that mootness goes a little bit more to damages and the merits and the timing of the case and is a different question than who should be bringing the case and who has standing to sue but in practice if your claim has become moot it's also unlikely that you are going to have standing to sue and as i already mentioned uh redressability can blur together in some cases like massachusetts versus epa uh with the in the dissenting opinion with the causation analysis now where did all of this come from well it's really inferred from the cases and controversies requirement in article three of the constitution and the idea is if we limit the powers of the judicial branch to actual cases and controversies they don't get to just pontificate about political questions or make policy then that also implies that certain people have a legitimate claim or controversy and other people don't keep in mind though that in terms of the grand arc of history with our legal system this is a bit of a newcomer this doctrine of standing the u.s supreme court first articulated the modern doctrine of standing in 1923. that might seem like a long time ago but it means that we've really only had a few decades of courts wrestling with what does this mean what is an injury in fact and so forth and the fact is reasonable minds still differ in one term of the u.s supreme court we might get a case about standing that's nine to nothing everybody agrees it's unanimous that there is standing or no standing and then this same term we may get a court a decision about standing that divides on party lines five to four or six to three and it seems like in those cases that standing is just a smoke screen for party affiliation or policy preferences also keep in mind that some people believe law professors and jurists and so forth that we should have a broad understanding of standing because we want to give more people access to the courts so it's an access to justice concern or we want the judicial branch to be able to provide effective checks and balances against the other two branches of government when they're spinning out of control or overreaching on the other hand if you think that there are just too many lawsuits and too much litigation today and that the courts are being activist judges and so forth then maybe you would prefer a restrictive doctrine of standing that ends up screening out a lot of cases and so as you can see a lot of people's sort of priors or assumptions about policy preferences do we have too many frivolous cases in the courts should people be solving their own problems or asking the other branches of government to solve their problems they may want to invoke standing concerns a lot and other people who think we need to use have the courts have more power and have more access to the courts for those who are suffering in our society they may want to sort of have a broader or looser definition of standing now in administrative law we also have this thing called the zone of interest test and sometimes this comes up also in private claims that are based entirely on a statute where a statute has created a cause of action between private parties in administrative law this is practically always the case why because these cases are citizens challenging an agency's action and the agency is acting pursuant to some sort of statutory mandate or statutory delegation from congress and sometimes a cause of action has been created by the their enabling statute or maybe the administrative procedure act and in that case the injury must fall within the type of contemplated harms that the statute was hoping to address or the reason that it created a cause of action in other words it's conceivable that you could have a bona fide injury or some you were able to prove that it's concrete and particularized that it's actual or imminent it's not a generalized grievance so you have that your injury is fairly traceable to the agency's action and maybe the the courts if they were going to take the case could really solve your problem but you are talking about something that's really outside the scope of that particular statute that you've brought your case under in which case you are outside the zone of interest that's a very simplified version of the zone of interest test but to be honest the most recent supreme court cases about the zone of interest test have been moving in the direction of simplifying the doctrine or going full circle all the way home to the original articulation of the zone of interest in the association of data processors case from the early 1970s so they're starting to back away from decades of things like talking about prudential standing and different courts doing different things in addition to the three prongs of standing and the court now seems to be saying when there's a statute involved we have the classic three prongs of standing and then you're going to use the tools of statutory construction to analyze the statute and figure out what's the scope what of the the parameters or the zone of harms that the statute was hoping to create a cause of action for and then this injury in fact had better fall within that zone of interest here's a quick review question to see if you've been paying attention what are the three main requirements for standing a injury in fact causation or traceability and redressability or b jurisdiction scope of review and liberty interest that's supposed to be an easy question if you're not sure about the answer then i'm not sure you were paying attention and you should probably re-watch this video that concludes our quick overview or recap about standing doctrine

Channel: Professor Stevenson

Views: 5,736

Keywords: Administrative Law, Admin Law, AdLaw, Regulation, Regulatory law, Public Law, Dru Stevenson, law school, STCL, STCLH, Zoom law school, Leg-Reg, Legislation course, deep state, bureaucracy, quick explainer, brief summary, Standing, justiciability, zone of interests

Id: sop7IJ569Ww

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021