How do advocacy groups such as the ACLU, the SPLC, or the Heritage Foundation have legal standing to even bring lawsuits?
I sometimes see cases entitled ACLU v. Government Officials XYZ. The ACLU, itself, hasn’t suffered any injury. How does this work?
In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union which related to the Communications Decency Act they published George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” monologue on their website to give them standing.
Well, the first thing i would ask the OP is whether his memory is actually accurate.
In my experience, the vast majority of cases in which the ACLU involves itself do NOT actually list the ACLU as the plaintiff. For example, the famous same-sex marriage case, in which the ACLU of Ohio played a crucial role, was called Obergefell et al. v. Hodges.
And if you go to this page, where the ACLU lists significant civil rights cases by year, you’ll see very few references to the organization in the case titles. In fact, going back ten years on that page, i did not find a single case listed as ACLU v. Someone.
My memory is fine, thank you very much.
A quick Google search finds:
ACLU v. Clapper
ACLU v. Department of Homeland Security
ACLU v. Department of Defense
ACLU v. DOJ
Typically when an advocacy group wants to challenge a law they have to go searching for a plantiff. In a couple of famous cases like Griswold and the Scopes case they also have the cooperation of local authorities who agree to arrest the person in order to provoke a trial and then an appeal.
Just reading the wiki page for this case we have this:
Bolding added - it sounds like the ACLU was a Verizon customer and therefore affected by the actions being taken.
I didn’t say it never happened. I was just pointing out that it is not typical.
And if you would read the actual cases that you have Googled, you would find at least one pretty straightforward answer to your question: in three of the four cases you have listed above, the ACLU was seeking the release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
That’s how they got standing: they wanted the documents, and the agencies in question had refused to release them. Basically anyone can file a FOIA request, and if they believe that their request has been improperly ignored or denied, they can also file a lawsuit seeking the documents.
In the case of ACLU v. Clapper, the organization had standing because it was affected by the government’s collection of metadata from “every phone call made or received by residents of the United States.”
That is, pretty much, how you get standing in a case: by being one of the affected parties. They note in the complaint that the government had acknowledged collecting metadata from phone calls made in the United States, and thus they filed suit as a party affected by this collection.
And in this case, the wiki article notes:
Actually, the title ACLU v. DoJ is pretty non-specific. There are dozens of cases that the ACLU has filed against the Department of Justice. The majority of them seem to be related to FOIA issues.
You are correct. I was just looking for a case where the ACLU was denied standing on a case. In fact, that case is ACLU vs NSA -
American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency - Wikipedia
“Affected” is not the same thing as injury, though. What damages did the ACLU suffer?
Isn’t that for the court to decide?
ACLU argued that the federal government violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure (of the ACLU’s call records) through the program. The courts have long held that an illegal search is itself injurious, even if nothing interesting was found.
As friedo notes, a violation of your Constitutional rights (which is what the ACLU was alleging) is an injury in and of itself, in the legal sense.
Ok, but that’s one case, based on the Fourth Amendment. What about the others that are based on FOIA requests?
I’m not a lawyer, but I thought that in order to be successful in a lawsuit, one had to show actual, not illusory, damages.
If you were entitled to documents under FOIA, and you didn’t get them, you have been injured by the government failing to provide a service which the law requires.
The lawsuits based on FOIA requests are suits that seek to have documents released under the FOIA. Most of these suits are brought after an FOIA request is submitted and the relevant government agency fails to release the requested documents.
Here is one example. In this case, the ACLU and its co-complainants made two separate FOIA requests for documents related to the torture of prisoners in US detention centers outside the country. They also, in the second application, asked for expedited processing.
As their Amended Complaint for Injunctive Relief says:
And of course, you don’t have to prove that you actually were injured by the defendant to sue them, that’s what the lawsuit is for. To get standing you have to meet a much lower bar.
You don’t have to prove damages to enter into a lawsuit. You claim that damages exist and the court decides whether you have or not. That is the essence of our entire court system.
It is often not clear who has legal standing for any particular claim. Again, that is the court’s decision. A plaintiff is not required to show proof of standing before it goes to court. How could that possibly work?
The process is clear. A person or entity makes a claim of damages. It enters a civil lawsuit. The court decides whether it has standing and then whether damages exist and then whether the defendant is guilty of causing those damages. That’s oversimplified but answers your question.
So the ACLU has a perfect right to file these lawsuits, just as you do personally, or other individual or group. It does not have an automatic right to win. Sometimes it will win. Sometimes it will be denied standing or denied damages. Sometimes the outcome is fairly clear-cut from the beginning. At other times, courts need to look closely at the individual facts that had not been litigated before in the light of new or reinterpreted laws. These can’t be known ahead of time. Courts exist precisely to make these determinations.
Already reported in another thread.