Article III of the United States Constitution requires, “at an irreducible minimum,” that a party must have standing to bring a lawsuit in federal court. Thus, whether a plaintiff has standing is the “threshold question in every federal case, determining the power of the court to entertain the suit.” However, reading the plain language of Article III will not reveal such a requirement. Instead, the standing doctrine is a product of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Article III’s conferment of power to federal courts over certain “Cases” and “Controversies.”
According to the Court, a case or controversy is only established within the meaning of Article III if a plaintiff has a sufficient “personal stake” in the suit, otherwise known as “standing.” The Court has gradually molded the standing doctrine through case law, including a “trend toward easing standing requirements” through a series of decisions in the early 1970s. Following these decisions, Article III standing requirements were considered “incoherent” and perplexing for judges and litigants to apply and satisfy.
Eventually, the Court resolved some ambiguity by assembling its precedent into the three-element test for standing articulated in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife:
First, the plaintiff must have suffered an “injury in fact” . . . which is . . . concrete and particularized . . . . Second, there must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of—the injury has to be “fairly . . . trace[able] to the challenged action of the defendant . . . .” Third, it must be “likely,” as opposed to merely “speculative,” that the injury will be “redressed by a favorable decision.”
Lujan’s user-friendly framework was a welcome change from the puzzling standing laws that had formerly persisted in federal court. In fact, this three-element test served as the basis for standing for more than thirty years.
Although Lujan continues to serve as a vital facet of the standing test, the Court has not shied away from further defining the contours of the standing doctrine through a series of recent decisions. In particular, the “injury-in-fact” requirement has been a trending issue in the Court’s cases in recent years.
The most notable of these cases, Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, have made clear that the violation of a statutory right alone does not suffice as a “concrete harm” to create standing in federal court. While recognizing that tangible harms, such as physical and economic harms, will comfortably meet the concrete harm requirement, the Court articulated a new test for intangible harms to be concrete enough for standing. The new test requires a plaintiff to prove that the “alleged intangible harm has a close relationship to a harm that has traditionally been regarded as providing a basis for a lawsuit in English or American courts.”
This new rule has spurred a flurry of conflicting deliberation among federal courts. Specifically, federal courts are split on the issue of whether a breach of contract alone, without any additional tangible harm, is enough to meet the concreteness requirement.
This Comment will argue that a breach of contract alone, without any additional tangible harm, should not suffice to meet Article III’s concrete harm requirement to sue in federal court.
