Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: In Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, the Supreme Court issued its first meaningful decision in nearly twenty-five years addressing procedural standing-the question of when violation of a statutory, procedural right presents the injury-in-fact required for standing under Article III.The opaque decision settled little, raising many important questions and leaving numerous circuit splits and enduring confusion on matters of compelling importance in its wake.Procedural standing is a significant front in the Court's nascent separation-of-powers revolution that was fueled by the appointments of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and the retirement of Justice Kennedy, who had been the fulcrum of the Court's prior procedural standing jurisprudence.Procedural standing will shape Congress's power to enact statutes that protect consumers' rights to informational privacy in cases involving data breaches and biometric hacks.The Article proposes a comprehensive scheme for understanding procedural standing under Spokeo and the concrete injury-in-fact it requires.The key is recognizing that Congress enacts statutory, procedural rights for multiple, distinct reasons, and that each category corresponds to a different set of rules for assessing the existence of procedural standing.There are two broad categories of procedural rights.First, there are intrinsically injurious rights, the violation of which itself constitutes injuryin-fact.Second, there are instrumental rights-newly brought into the procedural standing universe by Spokeo-the violation of which does not itself impose real-world harm.Congress enacts instrumental rights to prevent some other concrete, real-world injury.For one sub-type of instrumental rights, instrumental automatically injurious rights, Congress has concluded that violation of the statutory right is sufficient for standing
Author: Jon Romberg
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3006972486