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Page Number: 3

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

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Syllabus 

bers,” Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490, 511, an approach known as rep-
resentational or organizational standing.  To invoke it, an organization
must satisfy the three-part test in Hunt.  Respondents do not suggest 
that SFFA fails Hunt’s test for organizational standing.  They argue 
instead  that  SFFA  cannot  invoke  organizational  standing  at  all  be-
cause SFFA was not a genuine membership organization at the time 
it filed suit.  Respondents maintain that, under Hunt, a group qualifies 
as  a  genuine  membership  organization  only  if  it  is  controlled  and
funded by its members.  In Hunt, this Court determined that a state 
agency  with  no  traditional  members  could  still  qualify  as  a  genuine 
membership  organization  in  substance  because  the  agency  repre-
sented  the  interests  of  individuals  and  otherwise  satisfied  Hunt’s 
three-part  test  for  organizational  standing.    See  432  U. S.,  at  342. 
Hunt’s “indicia of membership” analysis, however, has no applicability 
here.  As  the  courts  below  found,  SFFA  is  indisputably  a  voluntary 
membership organization with identifiable members who support its 
mission and whom SFFA represents in good faith.  SFFA is thus enti-
tled to rely on the organizational standing doctrine as articulated in 
Hunt.  Pp. 6–9.

(b) Proposed by Congress and ratified by the States in the wake of 
the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall
“deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.”  Proponents 
of the Equal Protection Clause described its “foundation[al] principle” 
as “not permit[ing] any distinctions of law based on race or color.”  Any
“law which operates upon one man,” they maintained, should “operate
equally upon all.”  Accordingly, as this Court’s early decisions inter-
preting  the  Equal  Protection  Clause  explained,  the  Fourteenth 
Amendment guaranteed “that the law in the States shall be the same
for  the  black  as  for  the  white;  that  all  persons,  whether  colored  or 
white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.” 

Despite the early recognition of the broad sweep of the Equal Pro-
tection  Clause,  the  Court—alongside  the  country—quickly  failed  to
live up to the Clause’s core commitments.  For almost a century after 
the Civil War, state-mandated segregation was in many parts of the
Nation a regrettable norm.  This Court played its own role in that ig-
noble  history,  allowing  in  Plessy  v.  Ferguson  the  separate  but  equal
regime that would come to deface much of America.  163 U. S. 537. 

After Plessy, “American courts . . . labored with the doctrine [of sep-
arate but equal] for over half a century.”  Brown v. Board of Education, 
347 U. S. 483, 491.  Some cases in this period attempted to curtail the 
perniciousness of the doctrine by emphasizing that it required States
to provide black students educational opportunities equal to—even if 
formally  separate  from—those  enjoyed  by  white  students.    See,  e.g., 
Missouri  ex  rel.  Gaines  v.  Canada,  305  U. S.  337,  349–350.    But  the