Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-840_6jfm.pdf
Page Number: 39.0

14 

CALIFORNIA v. TEXAS 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

the Court wrote in Allen.  What Allen actually requires is a 
“personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly 
unlawful conduct,” id., at 751 (emphasis added).  And what 
this statement means is that the plaintiff ’s “injury” must
be  traceable  to  the  defendant’s  conduct,  and  that  conduct 
must be “allegedly unlawful.”7  “Allegedly unlawful” means
that the plaintiff must allege that the conduct is unlawful.
(The States allege that the challenged enforcement actions 
are unlawful using a traditional legal argument, see infra, 
at 15–20.)  But a plaintiff ’s standing (and thus the court’s 
Article  III  jurisdiction)  does  not  require  a  demonstration 
that the defendant’s conduct is in fact unlawful.  That is a 
merits issue. 

If Article III standing required a showing that the plain-
tiff ’s alleged injury is traceable to (i.e., in some way caused
by) an unconstitutional provision, then whenever a claim of 
unconstitutionality  was  ultimately  held  to  lack  legal
merit—even  after  a  full  trial—the  consequence  would  be
that the court lacked jurisdiction to entertain the suit in the
first place.  That would be absurd, and this Court has long
resisted efforts to transform ordinary merits questions into
threshold  jurisdictional  questions  by  jamming  them  into
the standing inquiry.  See, e.g., Arizona State Legislature v. 
Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n, 576 U. S. 787, 
800  (2015);  Whitmore  v.  Arkansas,  495  U. S.  149,  155 
(1990); ASARCO Inc. v. Kadish, 490 U. S. 605, 624 (1989).
“[S]tanding does not depend on the merits of a claim.”  Da-
vis v. United States, 564 U. S. 229, 249, n. 10 (2011) (inter-
nal quotation marks and alterations omitted).  And “ ‘juris-
diction is not defeated by the possibility that the averments 
[in  a  complaint]  might  fail  to  state  a  cause  of  action  on 
which  petitioners  could  actually  recover.’ ”  Steel  Co.,  523 
—————— 

7 Allen repeated that point seven more times, see 768 U. S., at 752, 753, 
n. 19, 757–759, and that is precisely what countless other cases require, 
see supra, at 9–10, and n. 5.  But the majority’s rejection of the relevant
theory of standing depends on this erroneous description of the law.