A Cause of Action, Anyone? Federal Equity and the Preemption of State Law

I was not fortunate enough to have known Dan Meltzer well. I met Danny only a few times. We had only the thinnest of correspondence. Of his sterling reputation as a human being, I am of course fully aware. And I do know his work--all of it--thoroughly. On that point, a mountain of encomiums would iterate only a simple thought: Dan was the gold standard in federal courts scholarship. (1) It is, therefore, a special honor to participate in a symposium to honor his memory. In this very brief Essay, I focus on aspects of a topic on which both Danny and I have written and on which our reasoning differed: federal court authority, "sitting in equity," to enjoin enforcement of state law on federal preemption grounds. In a coercive action brought by the state to enforce the state law, the federal act could of course be set up as a defense. Suppose, however, that alleging "arising under" subject-matter jurisdiction, (2) the plaintiff sues the appropriate state officials to restrain enforcement of the state statute. Many such challenges are readily entertained on the merits, often because these challenges have a firm statutory basis such as 42 U.S.C. [section] 1983. (3) But not all do. The Court has, however, asserted a more general, freestanding equitable injunctive authority: "[A]s we have long recognized, if an individual claims federal law immunizes him from state regulation, the court may issue an injunction upon finding the state regulatory actions pre empted." (4) Yet, not all such non-statutorily based challenges succeed. In Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center, Inc., (5) for example, the source of the preceding quotation, a divided Court just last term refused to entertain such a challenge by participants in a federal funding program (healthcare providers) seeking more favorable state-set Medicaid rates for their services. That result may or may not be sound, but to my mind what is most interesting is the intriguing nature of the various opinions, particularly given the Court's unanimous opinion one term earlier in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. (6) Lexmark's mode of analysis, if it takes firm root, should significantly reshape long-embedded modes of thinking about standing, at least at the statutory level. These two decisions and their intersection are the focus of this brief Essay. I. OLD BASICS For many decades law students have been taught that before a district court may address the merits of a private litigant's substantive claims, Article III requires that the plaintiff satisfy a three-part, trans-substantive set of "constitutional standing" requirements--injury-in-fact, causation, and redressability (7)--as well as three additional "prudential" justiciability barriers. (8) The source of judicial authority to fashion this discretionary overlay has never been made clear, (9) but its content generally included a ban on the assertion of both generalized grievances and third-party claims, (10) as well as a demand that the plaintiff s injury fall "within the zone of interests protected by the law invoked." (11) Allen v. Wright (12) is the casebook poster child for this body of doctrine. It is a leading case in virtually every casebook that has a section on standing. (13) But Association of Data Processing Service Organizations v. Camp, (14) decided in 1970, not Allen v. Wright, arguably is the doctrinal high-water mark. That decision, however, appears much later in the casebook standing sections. (15) And there is a puzzle about what it illustrates: statutory limits on article standing; prudential standing; the invention of the zone-of-interest standing limitations; the APA? Long familiarity with the decision has obscured its intellectual importance. In Data Processing, the Court said that standing is a matter distinct from and anterior to the plaintiff s merits claim: The "legal interest" test goes to the merits. The question of standing is different. …