Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-04-05422/USCOURTS-caDC-04-05422-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

---

United States Court of Appeals 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued October 28, 2005 Decided December 23, 2005 

No. 04-5422 

JUDICIAL WATCH, INC.,

APPELLANT

V. 

UNITED STATES SENATE, ET AL., 

APPELLEES

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the District of Columbia 

(No. 03cv01066) 

Paul J. Orfanedes argued the cause for appellant. With 

him on the briefs were James F. Peterson, Michael J. Hurley, 

and Meredith L. Cavallo. 

Thomas E. Caballero, Assistant Senate Legal Counsel, 

argued the cause for appellees. With him on the brief were 

Patricia Mack Bryan, Senate Legal Counsel, Morgan J. 

Frankel, Deputy Senate Legal Counsel, and Grant R. Vinik, 

Assistant Senate Legal Counsel. 

Before: SENTELLE and GARLAND, Circuit Judges, and 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 1 of 15
2

Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

Concurring Opinion filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: Senate Rule XXII 

provides that three fifths of all senators duly chosen and 

sworn can bring debate on an issue to a close. For 

amendments of the Senate rules themselves, however, cloture 

under Rule XXII requires a vote of two thirds of all senators 

present and voting. Rule V provides that the Senate’s rules 

continue from one Congress to the next unless changed as 

provided in the Senate rules. The three-fifths rule applies to 

judicial nominations. 

Judicial Watch, Inc., a non-profit organization that 

advocates “transparency, integrity and accountability in 

government, politics, and the law,” filed suit in district court 

against the Senate, its Secretary, and its Sergeant at Arms, 

challenging Rules V and XXII and seeking declaratory and 

injunctive relief. It claims that the rules in effect require 

supermajority support for confirmation of judicial nominees, 

in violation of Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, of the 

Constitution, which it reads as providing for confirmation by a 

simple majority. 

On a motion under Rule 12(b), the district court 

dismissed Judicial Watch’s suit for want of Article III 

standing. Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Senate, 340 F. Supp. 2d 

26, 38 (D.D.C. 2004). We affirm, though on somewhat 

different reasoning. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 2 of 15
3

* * * 

To show constitutional standing, Judicial Watch must 

meet the familiar requirements of injury-in-fact, causation, 

and redressability. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 

U.S. 555, 560-61 (1992). Judicial Watch points out that in 

pursuing its agenda it makes much use of the judicial process, 

having litigated over one hundred suits in state and federal 

court since its inception in 1994. It alleges that the challenged 

Senate rules have slowed the confirmation process and thus 

the filling of judicial vacancies, thereby injuring it by 

increasing delay in its lawsuits and adversely affecting its 

interest in “the efficient and proper function of the federal 

court system.” Judicial Watch, 340 F. Supp. 2d at 32. As

delay appears to be the only specific impairment of efficient 

function alleged, we will focus on it. 

The district court found that Judicial Watch failed to 

show any of the three elements of Article III standing. Id. at 

31-38. In rejecting Judicial Watch’s claim of injury-in-fact it 

relied heavily on language in Lujan describing the requisite 

injury as “invasion of a legally protected interest.” Id. at 31-

32 (emphasis added) (quoting Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560). The 

court concluded that Judicial Watch’s interest in speed of 

litigation either was not protected by the provisions that 

Judicial Watch cited (namely, 28 U.S.C. § 44 (providing for 

circuit judge appointments), the First Amendment, and the 

Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment), or at any rate 

was not protected by those provisions in such a way that the 

delays Judicial Watch claimed amounted to invasion of any 

“right” that they afforded Judicial Watch. 340 F. Supp. 2d at 

35. We, instead, assume arguendo that Judicial Watch has 

met the injury-in-fact requirement but find that its allegations 

fail to support an inference that the rules challenged here 

caused the alleged injury. See Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 3 of 15
4

751 (1984); Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights 

Organization, 426 U.S. 26, 41 (1976). 

Our review of the grant of the motion to dismiss for want 

of jurisdiction is de novo. See Information Handling Services, 

Inc. v. Defense Automated Printing Services, 338 F.3d 1024, 

1029 (D.C. Cir. 2003). In assessing plaintiff’s allegation that 

Rules XXII and V caused delays in plaintiff’s lawsuits, we 

assume the correctness of all plaintiff’s allegations of specific 

facts, such as the duration of specific appeals filed by plaintiff 

(which in any event are matters of public record). We do not, 

however, automatically accept its conclusory allegations that 

the challenged rules were a material cause for those durations. 

We assess plaintiff’s specific allegations for their “logical 

adequacy,” Haase v. Sessions, 835 F.2d 902, 908 (D.C. Cir. 

1987), and for “quantum of proof,” id., i.e., whether the 

specific alleged facts support inferences claimed by plaintiff, 

including an inference of causation, United Transp. Union v. 

ICC, 891 F.2d 908, 913 n.9 (D.C. Cir. 1989) (analyzing 

Simon). 

The first question is what rule would prevail in the 

absence of Rule XXII. As Senate practice from 1806 until the 

initiation of formal cloture rules in 1917 was evidently one of 

unlimited debate, invalidation of Rule XXII might well restore 

that practice, causing (on Judicial Watch’s theory) yet more 

delay. This of course edges over into problems of 

redressability. But Judicial Watch’s complaint asked for an 

injunction to stop defendants from “continuing to prevent 

votes” on the nominations of Miguel Estrada and Priscilla 

Owen (a request mooted by Miguel Estrada’s withdrawal and 

Judge Owen’s confirmation), Complaint at 9, Joint Appendix 

(“J.A.”) 17; given that request, it seems fair to read the next 

request in the complaint, asking for “any and all other relief 

the Court deems just and proper,” id., as encompassing a 

request for judicial substitution of a simple majority rule for 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 4 of 15
5

cloture on judicial nominations. But while Judicial Watch 

may have asked for such a judicial rewrite, our providing one 

would obviously raise the most acute problems, given the 

Senate’s independence in determining the rules of its 

proceedings and the novelty of judicial interference with such 

rules. See Page v. Shelby, 995 F. Supp. 23, 29 (D.D.C. 1998), 

aff’d, 172 F.3d 920 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (table). Rather than 

embark on those issues, we will assume arguendo that a court 

could somehow overcome them. But even with the heroic 

assumption that Judicial Watch might secure an order 

requiring a simple majority for cloture, we find that its 

causation allegations fail to show two links needed to support 

an inference that the three-fifths cloture rule caused slower 

case processing than would have prevailed under a majority 

cloture rule. 

First, we note that Judicial Watch offers no systematic 

evidence of confirmation delay due to Rule XXII. Granted, it 

faces considerable difficulty marshalling evidence, as the only 

changes in rules from 1917 to the present have been first to 

make non-unanimous cloture possible, then to reduce the 

requisite cloture majority (from two-thirds to three-fifths) and 

to change the applicable baseline (from senators present and 

voting to all senators). In any event, even if recent times have 

manifested an increase in confirmation times (a proposition 

that in fact is highly sensitive to the definition of the time 

period in which nominations may have been susceptible to the 

filibuster and to the classification of nominees ultimately not 

confirmed), plaintiff has alleged no facts supporting an 

inference of a material role for Rules V and XXII. Given the 

great variation in confirmation times in the nearly 200 years 

during which at least as a formal matter the Senate might be 

argued to have applied a supermajority cloture rule, it is not 

enough, in trying to support an inference that Rule XXII has 

played a material role, to rely simply on intuition. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 5 of 15
6

Second, even if Rule XXII has materially slowed the 

confirmation process, plaintiff’s allegations do almost nothing 

to show that such a slowing has materially increased case 

disposition time. One relevant variable that may be a main 

driver of disposition times, and relatively unresponsive to 

small changes in overall judgepower, is pre-argument 

processing (including procedural and dispositive motions). In 

fact, in the D.C. Circuit, the venue which Judicial Watch cites 

for evidence of delay, the median time from filing a notice of 

appeal to filing the last brief is four months longer than the 

systemwide median, while the median time from notice of 

appeal to final disposition is only 0.1 months (merely three 

days) longer than the median time for all circuits. See 

Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, U.S. Courts of 

Appeals Statistical Tables (Mar. 2003), available at

http://jnet.ao.dcn/img/assets/4647/appeal303.pdf (Table B4). 

Moreover, judges may respond to judicial vacancies by 

working harder. 

To show a link between delays in confirmations and in 

case dispositions, Judicial Watch again offers at best 

anecdotal data. It points in particular to two of its appeals 

filed in and decided by this court during the filibuster of 

Miguel Estrada in 2002, Oral Arg. Tape at 1:58; Complaint at 

5, J.A. 13 (citing Browning v. Clinton, 292 F.3d 235 (D.C. 

Cir. 2002); Meng v. Schwartz, 48 Fed. Appx. 1 (D.C. Cir. 

2002)), which took roughly 16-17 months from filing to 

disposition,1 and four cases unresolved when the complaint 

was filed and lasting roughly 18, 8, 6, and 5 months up to that 

 

1

 In the Meng case the 16-17 months estimate is a bit of a 

stretch, as the panel opinion issued about 13 and 1/2 months after 

filing; final rejection of an en banc petition required 2 and 1/2 

additional months. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 6 of 15
7

moment.2

 By way of supposed contrast, Judicial Watch’s 

complaint asserts that the median filing-to-disposition time for 

all federal appeals in 2002 was 10.7 months. 

The evidence proves little. First, Judicial Watch never in 

fact identifies what it regards as the filibuster era. Our best 

guess is that it sees that era at least as encompassing 2002—

the cases that Judicial Watch cites for evidence of delay were 

initiated in February and August of 2001, and the filibuster of 

its prime example, nominee Miguel Estrada, was ongoing in 

that year. But with no assertion of a specific time period, 

Judicial Watch has posed an effectively non-falsifiable claim. 

Second, Judicial Watch makes no effort to compare the 

systemwide case disposition time of 10.7 months in 2002 with 

disposition times in what it regards as filibuster-free eras. 

Third, focusing solely on its own D.C. Circuit cases, Judicial 

Watch makes no effort to show a pattern over time; and it 

disregards cases that it filed in the same era that were speedily 

resolved: Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Department of Justice, No. 

01-5019, 2001 WL 800022 (D.C. Cir. 2001) (4.5 months), and 

Hall v. Larsen, 46 Fed. Appx. 634 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (8 

months). See J.A. 31-32 (listing law suits filed by Judicial 

Watch). 

 

2

 These in due course concluded, taking roughly 20, 18, 8, and 

12 months. See Chung v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 333 F.3d 273 (D.C. 

Cir. 2003) (20 months until panel decision and 23.5 months until 

denial of rehearing and rehearing en banc); United We Stand 

America, Inc. v. I.R.S., 359 F.3d 595 (D.C. Cir. 2004) (18 months); 

In re Cheney, 334 F.3d 1096 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (8 months), vacated, 

Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Court, 542 U.S. 367 (2004) (19.5 months since 

filing notice of appeal in D.C. Circuit), mandamus granted en banc, 

In re Cheney, 406 F.3d 723 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (30 months since filing 

original notice of appeal in D.C. Circuit); Stewart v. Evans, 351 

F.3d 1239 (D.C. Cir 2003) (12 months). 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 7 of 15
8

Again, serious comparison would pose great difficulties. 

Judicial Watch and the Senate do not even agree, for example, 

on the calculation of vacancies. Compare Appellees’ Br. at 

36-37 n.26, with Appellant’s Reply Br. at 7 n.2. Ideally one 

would consider vacancies and nomination delays by circuits 

and court terms, and try to ascertain what if any relation may 

exist between these and case delay, accounting for other 

relevant differences. Judicial Watch has instead offered only 

a handful of cases selected to overrepresent case delay; these 

don’t begin to cut it. 

In short, Judicial Watch has failed to substantiate either 

essential link—between Rule XXII and delayed vacancy 

filling, and between delayed vacancy filling and delayed 

adjudication. See Allen, 468 U.S. at 759. 

Because we agree with the district court that Judicial 

Watch failed to establish the causation element of Article III 

standing, the judgment of the district court is 

Affirmed. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 8 of 15
1

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge, concurring: I write 

separately to express my puzzlement over the meaning of 

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife’s requirement that, for “injury 

in fact,” the plaintiff must show “invasion of a legally 

protected interest which is (a) concrete and particularized . . . 

and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.” 

504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992) (emphasis added) (citations and 

quotation marks omitted). 

The modifier “legally protected” has appeared 

episodically in Supreme Court opinions since its introduction 

in Lujan. Some seven cases employ the phrase, but in only 

two is it applied. See McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93, 227 

(2003) (finding a want of standing because the “injury” of not 

being able to compete in elections with equal resources is not 

“legally cognizable”); Vermont Agency of Natural Resources 

v. United States ex rel. Stevens, 529 U.S. 765, 771-73 (2000) 

(finding that False Claims Act, by partially assigning 

government’s injury to relator, confers standing for qui tam 

suit, but that absent the partial assignment the bounty would 

no more qualify than would a “wager on the outcome”). Five 

recite the “legally protected” language, but with no 

substantive discussion. See Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811, 819 

(1997); Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona, 520 U.S. 

43, 64 (1997); United States v. Hays, 515 U.S. 737, 742-43 

(1995); Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 211 

(1995); Northeastern Fla. Chapter of Associated Gen. 

Contractors of Am. v. City of Jacksonville, 508 U.S. 656, 663 

(1993). Two others expressly restate Lujan’s injury-in-fact 

test without the words “legally protected.” See Friends of the 

Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc.,

528 U.S 167, 180 (2000) (“In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 

we held that, to satisfy Article III's standing requirements, a 

plaintiff must show it has suffered an ‘injury in fact’ that is (a) 

concrete and particularized and (b) actual or imminent, not 

conjectural or hypothetical . . . .”) (citation omitted); Steel Co. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 9 of 15
2

v. Citizens for a Better Env't, 523 U.S. 83, 103 (1998) (“First 

and foremost, there must be alleged (and ultimately proved) 

an ‘injury in fact’–a harm suffered by the plaintiff that is 

‘concrete’ and ‘actual or imminent,’ not ‘conjectural’ or 

‘hypothetical.’”) (citation omitted). 

There are at least two obvious candidates for 

interpretation of the phrase. One would be that it simply 

reformulates pre-existing requirements, particularly that the 

interest affected be a cognizable one (variants of which are 

discussed below). Another would be that it imposes a 

requirement that the interest be one affirmatively protected by 

some positive law, either common law, statutory or 

constitutional. Powerful reasons favor the first interpretation. 

First, Lujan itself did not purport to announce a new rule 

but rather appeared aimed at restating the Article III standing 

triad. See 504 U.S. at 560 (“Over the years, our cases have 

established that the irreducible constitutional minimum of 

standing contains three elements.”). In fact, as we noted in 

Claybrook v. Slater, 111 F.3d 904 (D.C. Cir. 1997), the Lujan

Court itself found an interest “cognizable” for standing 

purposes (the desire to observe an animal species, even if 

purely for aesthetic purposes) with no discussion of any 

support in any positive law. See id. at 907 (citing 504 U.S. at 

562-63). Indeed, after using “legally protected” in the 

standing formula, the Lujan Court never again referred to it 

except commingled with “justiciable,” namely, in the 

observation that courts can participate in enforcement “only to 

the extent necessary to protect justiciable individual rights,” 

504 U.S. at 577 (emphasis added) (citation and internal 

quotation marks omitted). In Stevens, too, the words seemed 

in the course of the opinion to morph into “legally 

cognizable.” 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 10 of 15
3

Second, the use of the phrase “legally protected” to 

require showing of a substantive right would thwart a major 

function of standing doctrine—to avoid premature judicial 

involvement in resolution of issues on the merits. In 

Association of Data Processing Service Organizations, Inc. v. 

Camp, 397 U.S. 150, 153-54 (1970), the Court rejected the 

“legal interest” standard, proclaiming the separation of 

standing from merits issues. Since then it has continually 

insisted that Article III requires courts to refrain from 

substantive adjudication in the absence of a “case or 

controversy.” See Steel Co., 523 U.S. at 89-102; Ruhrgas AG 

v. Marathon Oil Co., 526 U.S. 574, 584-85 (1999). Given the 

imperative of standing as a threshold to rights determinations, 

it would seem strange to bring in through the backdoor what 

Data Processing threw out by the front. 

Third, the cases that Lujan itself purports to recapitulate, 

see 504 U.S. at 561, seem to demand only that the injury be 

“cognizable.” See Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 755-56 

(1984) (finding “stigmatic injury” of racial discrimination 

“not judicially cognizable”); Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 

514 (1975) (discussing statutory expansion of “judicially 

cognizable injury”); Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727, 740 

(1972) (noting that the injury in fact requirement does not 

“prevent any public interests from being protected through the 

judicial process”). 

Fourth, the Court appears to use the “legally protected” 

and “judicially cognizable” language interchangeably. Thus, 

in Bennett v. Spear, 520 U.S. 154 (1997), a post-Lujan case 

making no mention of “legally protected,” the Court 

substituted “judicially cognizable” in the exact place occupied 

in Lujan by “legally protected,” saying that Article III 

standing required “that the plaintiff have suffered an ‘injury in 

fact’–an invasion of a judicially cognizable interest which is 

(a) concrete and particularized and (b) actual or imminent, not 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 11 of 15
4

conjectural or hypothetical.” Id. at 167 (emphasis added). 

Others lapse into “cognizable” after an initial reference to 

“legally protected.” See Raines, 521 U.S. at 820 (the court 

must inquire whether the injury is “personal, particularized, 

concrete, and otherwise judicially cognizable”); United States 

v. Hays, 515 U.S. 737, 746 (1995) (finding claim of voters’ 

injury of living in segregated district not cognizable). And, as 

noted above, Lujan itself reverted to “cognizable” after the 

one reference to “legally protected” in the formula. 

Of the two cases actually applying the “legally protected” 

phrase, Stevens fits comfortably within the “judicially 

cognizable” label, at least if that phrase is understood (1) to 

encompass the other conventionally stated requirements (that 

the injury be concrete and particularized, and actual or 

imminent) and (2) possibly to serve as a screen (perhaps openended) against interests that it would make little sense to treat 

as adequate. In Stevens the Court accepted a qui tam relator’s 

bounty as legally protected, but only after making clear that 

someone who had placed a wager on the outcome of a suit 

would not have standing, 529 U.S. at 772, and, more 

generally, that “an interest that is merely a ‘byproduct’ of the 

suit itself cannot give rise to a cognizable injury,” id. at 773. 

This function as an open-ended screen fits Judge Posner’s 

hypothesis that the Court may have meant “just that not any 

old injury can satisfy Article III.” DePuy, Inc. v. Zimmer 

Holdings, Inc., 384 F. Supp. 2d 1237, 1240 (N.D. Ill. 2005). 

McConnell is more perplexing. There the Court seemed 

to mingle the breadth or diffusion of plaintiffs’ claims (which 

seems to involve the concrete/particularized and 

actual/imminent distinction), with issues of substantive right 

(whether an interest is protected under positive law). 

Plaintiffs, candidates and voters (and organizations of voters), 

attacked a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act 

of 2002 that raised the “hard money” limits of prior 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 12 of 15
5

legislation, claiming that it deprived them of “an equal ability 

to participate in the election process based on their economic 

status.” The Court said that it had “never recognized a legal 

right comparable to the broad and diffuse injury asserted by 

the . . . plaintiffs.” 540 U.S. at 227. The two adjectives might 

suggest that the defect of plaintiffs’ interest was its breadth or 

diffusion (though why a competitive interest would be too 

broad or diffuse is obscure–see, e.g., National Credit Union 

Administration v. First National Bank, 522 U.S. 479 (1998)). 

But the Court then went on to assert unambiguously merits 

propositions, quoting Federal Election Commission v. 

Massachusetts Citizens for Life, 479 U.S. 238, 257 (1986), for 

the point that the right to political “‘free trade’ does not 

necessarily require that all who participate in the political 

marketplace do so with exactly equal resources,” and Buckley 

v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 48 (1976), for its rejection of any 

government interest in equalizing relative ability to compete 

as a justification for burdens on speech in the form of 

expenditure limits. McConnell, 540 U.S. at 227. In 

explaining these merits propositions, neither Massachusetts 

Citizens nor Buckley ever hinted that the interests or rights in 

question failed for excessive breadth or diffusion. 

Of course the “zone of interests” requirement of 

prudential standing poses the question whether the plaintiff’s 

interest is so incongruent with the statutory purposes as to 

preclude an inference that Congress might have intended such 

a party as a challenger. See Clarke v. Securities Industry 

Ass'n, 479 U.S. 388, 395 n.9 (1987). Some decisions use the 

“legally protected” language to reject claims on the ground of 

such incongruity. Thus in Animal Legal Defense Fund v. 

Glickman, 154 F.3d 426 (D.C. Cir. 1998), we said that a 

hypothetical sadist’s interest in seeing animals living under 

inhumane conditions wouldn’t qualify, because the statute in 

question (the Animal Welfare Act) “recognizes no interest in 

sadism.” Id. at 434 n.7. We framed the defect as a lack of 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 13 of 15
6

Lujan-required legal protection. Id. But Judge Sentelle’s 

analysis in dissent, saying that the majority had conflated 

Article III and prudential standing, id. at 449, seems correct. 

(Neither the hypothetical, nor the choice of its correct 

standing slot, appears to have been determinative of the 

outcome in Animal Legal Defense Fund.)1

 See also DePuy, 

384 F. Supp. 2d at 1240 (noting that “most cases before and 

after Lujan place the requirement that a plaintiff have a legally 

protected interest on the ‘prudential’ side of the standing 

ledger”); Grossman v. Dean, 80 P.3d 952, 958 (Colo. App. Ct. 

2003) (“The requirement that the injury be to a legally 

protected interest is grounded on prudential considerations.”) 

(quotation omitted). 

Our decision in Claybrook v. Slater is also hard to 

classify. As already noted, we pointed out that in Lujan itself 

the Court had found an aesthetic interest in observing animals 

to qualify as cognizable without actually examining statutes or 

any source of positive law to see if it was “legally protected.” 

111 F.3d at 907. We proceeded to affirm the district court’s 

dismissal of the suit for want of jurisdiction; but our theory of 

jurisdictional deficit was that the challenged official decision 

was one committed to agency discretion by law under 5 

U.S.C. § 701(a)(2) and thus exempt from judicial review. Id. 

at 908-09. Although we characterized our decision as one of 

standing, the classification seems to have had no consequence; 

it certainly didn’t involve resolving substantive legal issues. 

See Steenholdt v. FAA, 314 F.3d 633, 638 (D.C. Cir. 2003) 

 

1

 Under the reading of Stevens offered above, the Animal 

Legal Defense Fund majority’s position might be reframed as an 

application of the idea that “judicially cognizable” includes an 

open-ended screening function. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 14 of 15
7

(noting that courts lack jurisdiction to review actions 

committed to agency discretion). 

Pending Supreme Court clarification, users of the “legally 

protected” tag should proceed with caution. 

USCA Case #04-5422 Document #938869 Filed: 12/23/2005 Page 15 of 15