CON LAW NOTES 10/30

Standing to sue! the sexiest topic ever!

three questions to answer when you're deciding a case
-jurisdiction- are we allowed to decide the case?
-standing to sue- is the plaintiff allowed to bring the case?
-Justiciability- is it a good idea to decide this case?

standing to sue really only came into play pretty recently
-origins were political
-fostered by some of the more liberal justices of the 1930s (brandeis, frankfurter)
-they were trying to protect the New Deal from the court, by making sure people didnt have the standing to bring cases
-nowadays, the doctrine is more used by the conservatives
-has roots in Article 3 AND is prudential
-basically, the doctrines are incoherent and contradictory

there's one case that encapsulates all of these questions. yay
-the Lujane case? lujan? fuck.
-involved several ardent environmentalists
-suing to force the secretary of state to force environmental rules onto other countries which they wanted to visit
-essentially, the secretary of state had no jurisdiction to force rules onto other countries
-scalia writes up a nice doctrine for standing to sue
-1) must have suffered an injury in fact, not a pretend one. must be real, but not necessarily physical
-2) must show a causal connection between the injury and the conduct or law complained of (must be traceable to the actions sued for)
-3) the injury must be redressable (assuming that the first two tests are met, this is the question of whether the supreme court or the party sued can do anything about it)
-4) oops. maybe three

another interesting case- US vs SCRAP
-SCRAP= students challenging regulatory something procedures
-scrap became an unincorporated organization
-they sued the interstate commerce commission to suspend a temporary surcharge on freight rails
-their alleged injury was that a general rate increase causes an increase in the use of raw materials, causes more junk and trash in the parks, which they use
-wtf.
-court accepts this. for some reason
-they say that there's an 'attenuated line of causation'

right now, the Rehnquist and Roberts courts are pretty hostile using standing to sue
-cause they're more conservative
-the warren court was more liberal, opened up the courts more. interesting, no?

original cases that were nice and defined standing to sue:
-Frothingham v. Melon
-Massachucetts v. Melon
-Melon was the secretary of the treasury
-mrs. frothingham was a citizen of mass.
-sued the sec. of the treasury under the maternity act of 1921, trying to stop the money from being spent
-the maternity act was money spent by congress given to states that would be used to reduce infant mortality
-she argued that this was a power reserved by the state, NOT given to the federal government
-also argued that it was unconstitutional because it would increase her tax burden, taking her property without due process (5th amendment)
-unanimous rejection of Mrs. Frothingham's case because of lack of jurisdiction
-first, Frothingham had too minute an interest to permit her to sue on 5th amendment grounds, and if these cases were allowed, everybody would challenge everything
-BTW, for personal knowledge, if you want to sue for something like this, you have to actually be harmed first (so you have to actually pay the tax before you can sue against it)
-2nd, she showed NO SIGN of personal injury. supreme court cannot decide cases in the abstract

in 1965, congress passed a bill known as the secondary school education act
-first major funding bill for secondary schools in the US by the federal govt
-this was mostly in the form of block grants
-in order to pass the bill, the supporters had to agree to an amendment that said that the bill would not only fund public schools, but also private and parochial schools
-back in that time, nearly every single private school was catholic
-lyndon johnson signed the bill, assuming that the courts would just strike down the religious school part of the bill
-this led to the case: Flast v Cohen
-cohen was basically the secretary of education
-flast was a plaintiff
-the court rules that Frothingham was not an absolute barrier to a taxpayer suit
-the warren court rules that a taxpayer could bring a lawsuit, under specific circumstances
-for instance, if he brought a constitutional question
-Flast met the tests, Frothingham didn't
standing to sue, however, has still been relatively scaled back