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12  CAMERON v. EMW WOMEN’S SURGICAL CENTER, P. S. C. 

Opinion of the Court 

368–369. 
  The situation here is starkly different.  As discussed, the 
attorney  general’s  motion  was  timely,  and  intervention 
would not have produced anything like the disruption that 
the  Court  cited  in  NAACP  v.  New  York.    Thus,  the  panel 
was mistaken in finding that the attorney general’s motion 
was untimely. 

C 
  The  panel’s  finding  on  prejudice  was  similarly  flawed.  
The  panel  argued  that  intervention  would  prejudice  re-
spondents  because  the  attorney  general’s  rehearing  peti-
tion  pressed  an  issue  (third-party  standing)  that  had  not 
been raised in the secretary’s briefs.  831 Fed. Appx., at 751, 
752.  But the lack of third-party standing was not the only 
argument  advanced  in  the  rehearing  petition,  App.  221–
227, and in any event, allowing the attorney general to in-
tervene  would  not  have  necessitated  that  the  third-party 
standing issue be entertained.  If the secretary for Health 
and Family Services had not retired from the field, he could 
have raised that same argument in a petition for rehearing 
or  in  a petition for certiorari.    In  that  event,  the  relevant 
court  (the  Sixth  Circuit  in  deciding  whether  to  grant  en 
banc  review  and  this  Court  in  deciding  whether  to  grant 
certiorari)  could  have  considered  whether  the  third-party 
standing argument should be considered despite the secre-
tary’s  failure  to  raise  the  issue  at  an  earlier  point  in  the 
litigation.  That the issue was raised in the attorney gen-
eral’s rehearing petition, as opposed to one filed by the sec-
retary, was immaterial. 
  Our  decision  in  McDonald  illustrates  the  panel’s  error.  
In that case, we held that the defendant was not “unfairly 
prejudiced simply because an appeal on behalf of putative 
class members was brought by [an unnamed class member] 
rather than by one of the original” parties, 432 U. S., at 394.  
The situation here is similar.