Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 76.0

524US1

Unit: $U72

[09-06-00 17:28:15] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 524 U. S. 11 (1998)

31

Scalia, J., dissenting

manding provision of information that the law requires the
agency to furnish—one demanding compliance with the
Freedom of Information Act or the Federal Advisory Com-
mittee Act, for example—can reasonably be described as
being “aggrieved” by the agency’s refusal to provide it.
What the respondents complain of in this suit, however, is
not the refusal to provide information, but the refusal (for
an allegedly improper reason) to commence an agency en-
forcement action against a third person. That refusal itself
plainly does not render respondents “aggrieved” within the
meaning of the Act, for in that case there would have been
no reason for the Act to differentiate between “person” in
subsection (a)(1) and “party aggrieved” in subsection (a)(8).
Respondents claim that each of them is elevated to the spe-
cial status of a “party aggrieved” by the fact that the re-
quested enforcement action (if it was successful) would have
had the effect, among others, of placing certain information
in the agency’s possession, where respondents, along with
everyone else in the world, would have had access to it.
It
seems to me most unlikely that the failure to produce that
effect—both a secondary consequence of what respondents
immediately seek, and a consequence that affects respond-
ents no more and with no greater particularity than it affects
virtually the entire population—would have been meant to
set apart each respondent as a “party aggrieved” (as opposed
to just a rejected complainant) within the meaning of the
statute.

This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that this
citizen-suit provision was enacted two years after this
Court’s decision in United States v. Richardson, 418 U. S.
166 (1974), which, as I shall discuss at greater length below,
gave Congress every reason to believe that a voter’s interest
in information helpful to his exercise of the franchise was
constitutionally inadequate to confer standing. Richard-
son had said that a plaintiff ’s complaint that the Government
was unlawfully depriving him of information he needed to