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FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N v. AKINS

Opinion of the Court

lowed not normally sufﬁcient by itself to confer standing);
Frothingham, supra, at 488 (party may not merely assert
that “he suffers in some indeﬁnite way in common with peo-
ple generally”); Perkins v. Lukens Steel Co., 310 U. S. 113,
125 (1940) (plaintiffs lack standing because they have failed
to show injury to “a particular right of their own, as distin-
guished from the public’s interest in the administration of
the law”). The abstract nature of the harm—for example,
injury to the interest in seeing that the law is obeyed—de-
prives the case of the concrete speciﬁcity that characterized
those controversies which were “the traditional concern of
the courts at Westminster,” Coleman, 307 U. S., at 460
(Frankfurter, J., dissenting); and which today prevents a
plaintiff from obtaining what would, in effect, amount to an
advisory opinion. Cf. Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Haworth, 300
U. S. 227, 240–241 (1937).

.

Often the fact that an interest is abstract and the fact that
it is widely shared go hand in hand. But their association is
not invariable, and where a harm is concrete, though widely
shared, the Court has found “injury in fact.” See Public
Citizen, 491 U. S., at 449–450 (“The fact that other citizens
or groups of citizens might make the same complaint after
unsuccessfully demanding disclosure .
. does not lessen
[their] asserted injury”). Thus the fact that a political forum
may be more readily available where an injury is widely
shared (while counseling against, say, interpreting a statute
as conferring standing) does not, by itself, automatically dis-
qualify an interest for Article III purposes. Such an inter-
est, where sufﬁciently concrete, may count as an “injury in
fact.” This conclusion seems particularly obvious where (to
use a hypothetical example) large numbers of individuals suf-
fer the same common-law injury (say, a widespread mass
tort), or where large numbers of voters suffer interference
with voting rights conferred by law. Cf. Lujan, supra, at
572; Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 905 (1996). We conclude
that, similarly, the informational injury at issue here, di-