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Page Number: 14.0

10 

TRANSUNION LLC v. RAMIREZ 

Opinion of the Court 

U. S. 520 (1993) (infringement of free exercise)).

In determining whether a harm is sufficiently concrete to
qualify as an injury in fact, the Court in Spokeo said that 
Congress’s  views  may  be  “instructive.”    578  U. S.,  at  341. 
Courts must afford due respect to Congress’s decision to im-
pose  a  statutory  prohibition  or  obligation  on  a  defendant, 
and to grant a plaintiff a cause of action to sue over the de-
fendant’s  violation  of  that  statutory  prohibition  or  obliga-
tion.  See id., at 340–341.  In that way, Congress may “ele-
vate  to  the  status  of  legally  cognizable  injuries  concrete, 
de facto  injuries  that  were  previously  inadequate  in  law.” 
Id., at 341 (alterations and internal quotation marks omit-
ted); see Lujan, 504 U. S., at 562–563, 578; cf., e.g., Allen v. 
Wright,  468  U. S.  737,  757,  n.  22  (1984)  (discriminatory 
treatment).  But  even  though  “Congress  may  ‘elevate’
harms that ‘exist’ in the real world before Congress recog-
nized them to actionable legal status, it may not simply en-
act an injury into existence, using its lawmaking power to 
transform  something  that  is  not  remotely  harmful  into 
something  that  is.”  Hagy  v.  Demers  &  Adams,  882  F. 3d 
616, 622 (CA6 2018) (Sutton, J.) (citing Spokeo, 578 U. S., 
at 341).

Importantly, this Court has rejected the proposition that 
“a  plaintiff  automatically  satisfies  the  injury-in-fact  re-
quirement whenever a statute grants a person a statutory 
right and purports to authorize that person to sue to vindi-
cate that right.”  Spokeo, 578 U. S., at 341.  As the Court 
emphasized in Spokeo, “Article III standing requires a con-
crete  injury  even  in  the  context  of  a  statutory  violation.” 
Ibid. 

Congress’s  creation  of  a  statutory  prohibition  or  obliga-
tion  and  a  cause  of  action  does  not  relieve  courts  of  their 
responsibility  to  independently  decide  whether  a  plaintiff 
has  suffered  a  concrete  harm  under  Article  III  any  more 
than, for example, Congress’s enactment of a law regulating