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Page Number: 67

6 

JUNE MEDICAL SERVICES L. L. C. v. RUSSO 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

quirement.    The  Court  has  acknowledged  that  the  tradi-
tional rule against third-party standing is “closely related
to Art[icle] III concerns.”  Warth  v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490, 
500  (1975).  It  has  repeatedly  noted  that  the  rule  “is  not 
completely separable from Art[icle] III’s requirement that a 
plaintiff have a sufficiently concrete interest in the outcome 
of [the] suit to make it a case or controversy.”  Secretary of 
State of Md. v. Joseph H. Munson Co., 467 U. S. 947, 955, 
n. 5  (1984)  (internal  quotation  marks  omitted);  see  also 
Barrows, supra, at 255 (the rule against third-party stand-
ing is “not always clearly distinguished from the constitu-
tional limitation[s]” on standing).  Moreover, the Court has 
even  expressly  stated  that  the  rule  against  third-party
standing is “grounded in Art[icle] III limits on the jurisdic-
tion  of  federal  courts  to  actual  cases  and  controversies.” 
New York v. Ferber, 458 U. S. 747, 767, n. 20 (1982).  

And most recently, in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U. S. ___ 
(2016), the Court appeared to incorporate the rule against 
third-party standing into its understanding of Article III’s 
injury-in-fact requirement.  There, the Court stated that to 
establish an injury-in-fact a plaintiff must “show that he or 
she suffered ‘an invasion of a legally protected interest’ that
is ‘concrete and particularized’ and ‘actual or imminent, not 
conjectural  or  hypothetical.’ ”    Id.,  at  ___  (slip  op.,  at  7) 
(quoting Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560 
(1992)).  The Court further explained that whether a plain-
tiff  “alleges  that  [the  defendant]  violated  his  statutory
rights ”  rather  than  “the  statutory  rights  of  other  people ” 
was  a  question  of  “particularization”  for  an  Article  III  in-
jury.  578  U. S.,  at  ___  (slip  op.,  at  8)  (internal  quotation 
marks  omitted).  It  is  hard  to  reconcile  this  language  in 
Spokeo  with  the  plurality’s  assertion  that  third-party 
standing is permitted under Article III.