Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/22-506_nmip.pdf
Page Number: 56.0

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

9 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

hot or divisive.  But Missouri?  In adjudicating Missouri’s
claim, the majority reaches out to decide a matter it has no 
business deciding.  It blows through a constitutional guard-
rail intended to keep courts acting like courts. 

B 
The  majority  does  not  over-expend  itself  in  defending 
that action.  It recites the State’s assertion that a “harm to 
MOHELA is also a harm to Missouri” because the former is 
the latter’s instrumentality.  Ante, at 8.  But in doing so, the 
majority  barely  addresses  MOHELA’s  separate  corporate
identity,  its  financial  independence,  and  its  distinct  legal 
rights.  In other words, the majority glides swiftly over all 
the  attributes  of  MOHELA  ensuring  that  its  economic 
losses (1) are not passed on to the State and (2) can be rec-
tified (if there is legal wrong) without the State’s help.  The 
majority is left to argue from a couple of prior decisions and 
a single idea, the latter relating to the State’s desire to “aid
Missouri college students.”  Ante, at 9.  But the decisions do 
not stand for what the majority claims.  And the idea col-
lides with another core precept of standing law.  All in all, 
the majority’s justifications turn standing law from a pillar
of a restrained judiciary into nothing more than “a lawyer’s
game.”  Massachusetts  v.  EPA,  549  U. S.  497,  548  (2007) 
(ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting). 

The  majority  mainly  relies  on  Arkansas  v.  Texas,  346 
U. S. 368 (1953), but that case shows only that not all public
instrumentalities are the same.  The Court there held that 
Arkansas  could  bring  suit  on  behalf  of  a  state  university.
But it did so because the school lacked the financial and le-
gal  separateness  MOHELA  has.  Arkansas,  we  observed, 
“owns all the property used by the University.”  Id., at 370. 
And the suit, if successful, would have enhanced that prop-
erty:  The  litigation  sought  to  stop  Texas  from  interfering
with a contract to build a medical facility on campus.  For 
the  same  reason,  the  Court  found  that  “any  injury  under