(If this is more GD territory, feel free to move.)
Inspired by a highly rated Slashdot post I just read:
Why is our system better for having standing requirements? What would happen if we didn’t? Certainly big cases on both sides have been dismissed due to lack of it; what would have been the harm if they had proceeded?
Shouldn’t we be wary of countless people repeated challenging laws they don’t like? If the law was properly created either through a vote or legislation, it harms that institution if any random group can just challenge it non-stop. If they lose it once, just have someone else challenge it. Endless challenges to a law in order to hold up its enforcement does not benefit democracy, I think.
Imagine the whole Prop 8 thing if the SCOTUS said anyone had standing. We’d never hear the end of the challenges. We had private groups, political groups, religious groups all lining up to challenge it. Many of them were out of state, so it doesn’t affect them. Why should they have unlimited amounts of challenges and why should outside forces challenge a law that doesn’t affect them?
Here’s a few reasons:
Our courts are already severely overloaded. The more cases we have, the worse the decision-making. Standing limits the cases to those in which the parties actually affected by the law want to do something about it.
The scope of judicial power in our tripartite system was a subject of great concern to the founders. They didn’t want judges to be able to muck with the roles of the legislature and executive willy-nilly. Standing identifies the sort of issue–a controversy between two involved entities–that is appropriately resolved by the judicial branch instead of as a more general policy matter by the legislature.
Standing ensures that the parties in the adversarial process have a strong self-interest. If any plaintiff can challenge some action as illegal, but have any skin in the game, he might not fight as hard as is needed for our adversarial process to function.
A variation of this would be to have someone who supports the law challenge it and do a deliberately bad job. The law gets upheld. Now it is going to be much harder to launch a new challenge.
The flip side of this is when the state AG actually wants the law to be repealed (e.g., in some recent marriage equality cases). So they just back out of defending it or don’t really defend it at all. This leaves the law supporters in a weak position if they aren’t viewed as having standing.