Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 507

524US2

Unit: $U93

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462

CLINTON v. CITY OF NEW YORK

Opinion of Scalia, J.

Ibid.

withdrawing the land from agricultural production, whereas
sale—even at bargain-basement prices for the land—would
at least enable recoupment of the cost of improvements, such
as drainage systems.
In the present case, by con-
trast, we have no reason to believe that IPP is not operating
its processing plant at a proﬁt, and will not continue to do so
in the future; Snake River has proffered no evidence that
IPP or any other processor would surely have sold if only
the President had not canceled the tax deferral. The only
uncertainty in Bryant was whether any of the respondents
would wind up as buyers of any of the excess land; that
seemed probable enough, since “respondents are residents of
the Imperial Valley who desire to purchase the excess land
for purposes of farming.”
Ibid. We have no basis to say
that it is “likely” that Snake River would have purchased a
processing facility if § 968 had not been canceled.

More fundamentally, however, the reasoning of Bryant
should not govern the present case because it represents a
crabbed view of the standing doctrine that has been super-
seded. Bryant was decided at the tail-end of “an era in
which it was thought that the only function of the constitu-
tional requirement of standing was ‘to assure that concrete
adverseness which sharpens the presentation of issues,’ ”
Spencer v. Kemna, 523 U. S. 1, 11 (1998), quoting Baker v.
Carr, 369 U. S. 186, 204 (1962). Thus, the Bryant Court ulti-
mately afforded the respondents standing simply because
they “had a sufﬁcient stake in the outcome of the contro-
versy,” 447 U. S., at 368, not because they had demonstrated
injury in fact, causation, and redressability.
“That parsimo-
nious view of the function of Article III standing has since
yielded to the acknowledgment that the constitutional re-
quirement is a ‘means of “deﬁn[ing] the role assigned to the
judiciary in a tripartite allocation of power,” ’ and ‘a part of
the basic charter . . . provid[ing] for the interaction between
[the federal] government and the governments of the several
States,’ ” Spencer, supra, at 11–12, quoting Valley Forge