Opinion ID: 799387
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether CDIA has standing to seek injunctive relief against the Attorney General

Text: There are three components to Article III standinginjury, causality, and redressabilityand each must be established before a federal court can review the merits of a case. Summers v. Earth Island Inst., 555 U.S. 488, 492-93, 129 S.Ct. 1142, 173 L.Ed.2d 1 (2009). Although CDIA had not yet been injured when it filed suit, the existence of a statute implies the threat of its enforcement, and the association was entitled to bring a pre-enforcement challenge based on the probability of future injury. See Shaw v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 463 U.S. 85, 96 n. 14, 103 S.Ct. 2890, 77 L.Ed.2d 490 (1983); Abbott Labs. v. Gardner, 387 U.S. 136, 153-54, 87 S.Ct. 1507, 18 L.Ed.2d 681 (1967). The primary issue on appeal is whether the injury identified in the complaint can be redressed by the relief sought against the Attorney General. It is CDIA's contention that it can, and that the district court's conclusion to the contrary was based on an unduly restrictive conception of redressability. In CDIA's view, if a court can provide the requested relief, thereby improving upon the status quo ante, the claim is justiciable, even if it does not completely redress the claimed injury. Like the other elements of standing, redressability is meant to foster the concrete adverseness which sharpens the presentation of issues upon which the court so largely depends for illumination of difficult constitutional questions. Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Envtl. Study Group, 438 U.S. 59, 72, 98 S.Ct. 2620, 57 L.Ed.2d 595 (1978). [T]he relevant inquiry is whether . . . the plaintiff has shown an injury to himself that is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision. Simon v. E. Ky. Welfare Rights Org., 426 U.S. 26, 38, 96 S.Ct. 1917, 48 L.Ed.2d 450 (1976). The Supreme Court has rejected interpretations of the rule that demand complete redressability, stressing that a plaintiff need show only that a favorable decision would redress  an injury, not  every injury. Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228, 243 n. 15, 102 S.Ct. 1673, 72 L.Ed.2d 33 (1982). Hence Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497, 526, 127 S.Ct. 1438, 167 L.Ed.2d 248 (2007), where the Supreme Court concluded that Massachusetts had standing to challenge the EPA's refusal to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions despite the attenuated causal chain linking agency non-action to potential environmental damage. Redressability was satisfied, the Court explained, because the risk of harm would be reduced to some extent if petitioners received the relief they seek. Id. (emphasis added). Echoing this principle, in Chamber of Commerce of U.S. v. Edmondson, 594 F.3d 742, 757 (10th Cir.2010), we decided that a group of business federations could seek an injunction restraining the Oklahoma Attorney General from enforcing a law requiring public employers to condition eligibility for state contracts on the contractor's use of a specific system for verifying the immigration status of its workers. Id. at 750. Oklahoma had argued that a favorable decision against the Attorney General would not materially redress the plaintiffs' primary injurythe choice between paying the costs of complying with the law or being deemed ineligible for state contracts. As the State saw it, that injury had nothing to do with the Attorney General and everything to do with public employers who refused to contract with non-complying businesses. Id. Still, this Court was satisfied that an injunction against the Attorney General would alleviate the injury to some extent. Id. at 758. Since the Attorney General often prepared contracts at the request of public employers, an injunction would preclude him from adding clauses requiring the use of the designated verification system. Id. An injunction would also prevent the Attorney General from filing or defending lawsuits on the basis of the challenged provision. Id. These were discrete injuries redressable by the requested relief, and it mattered not that public employers could still refuse to enter into contracts with non-complying businesses. An opposite holding, the court explained, would contravene Supreme Court precedent so as to require complete redressability. Id. at n. 16. Against this backdrop, it seems uncontroversial that restraining the Attorney General from enforcing the allegedly preempted provisions of the FCRISA would go a long way toward providing relief for CDIA's members. Indeed, even if CDIA's members would not be out of the woods, a favorable decision would relieve their problem to some extent, which is all the law requires. See Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. at 526, 127 S.Ct. 1438. The district court, however, read this court's decision in Nova Health as compelling a different conclusion, and CDIA's appeal hinges on whether the district court's reading was proper. The statute at issue in Nova Health made abortion providers liable for medical costs resulting from abortions performed on minor patients whose parents were not notified prior to surgery. 416 F.3d at 1152-53. Among those authorized to sue for costs were the minor patients and any medical facility incurring costs for treating them. Id. Nova Health Services, an abortion provider, sued the administrators of several public health institutions, asking the district court to declare the statute unconstitutional and to enjoin the defendants from filing suit. Id. Although the named defendants were public officials, none had sued or threatened to sue Nova, nor had any possessed enforcement authority beyond what the statute granted to any medical facility incurring costs for treating minors with abortion-related complications. Id. at 1153-54, 1157. Not surprisingly, the primary question on appeal was whether Nova could fairly trace its injury to the conduct of the named defendants. Id. at 1156. In concluding that it could not, we explained that [e]ven if these defendants were enjoined from seeking damages against Nova . . ., there would still be a multitude of other prospective litigants who could potentially sue Nova under that act. Id. at 1157. Although public officials by title, the defendants were in the same position as any private litigant who could bring a claim under the challenged provision. Id. The very power to litigate, we explained, was not sufficient to support standing: Article III does not allow a plaintiff who wishes to challenge state legislation to do so simply by naming as a defendant anyone who, under appropriate circumstances, might conceivably have an occasion to file a suit. . . under the relevant state law at some future date. Id. at 1157-58. Here, in concluding CDIA lacked standing to sue, the district court thought CDIA's pre-enforcement challenge suffered from the same defect as the one in Nova Health : it sought to restrain one party from enforcing the challenged statute where there was a multitude of litigants with identical enforcement power outside the scope of the injunction. Even with the Attorney General out of the picture, the district court reasoned, aggrieved consumers would still have the right to sue, and CDIA's members would still be left to choose between litigation and the costs of compliance. An injunction that merely prohibits [the Attorney General] from enforcing the FCRISA, while leaving every affected consumer free to pursue a private lawsuit, the court stated, appears unlikely to eliminate the dilemma faced by CDIA's members. (D. Ct. Order at 6). The district court stretched Nova Health beyond its elastic limits. Nova Health is a fact-bound decision with little bearing on the merits of this case. It sheds no light on the doctrine of redressability beyond its narrow holdinga party lacks standing to seek an injunction against a nominally public defendant who has not threatened suit and who cannot be distinguished from the countless private litigants with identical enforcement powers. That holding does not apply here because the Attorney General does have special enforcement authority and can be distinguished from the garden-variety private litigant. [1] The chief distinctions are obvious: The Attorney General is the state's most powerful litigant and, in this case, the only one authorized to sue on behalf of New Mexico. His office has the resources to outlast private consumers and the manpower to prosecute dozens of cases at a time. More importantly, his right to sue is broader than the consumer's, and not only in the sense that he can sue on their behalf or join in actions arising under the FCRISA. Unlike consumers, the Attorney General can sue without regard to whether the violation caused injuryan entire category of cases in his exclusive domain. [2] See N.M. Stat. § 56-3A-5. The State contends Nova Health ought to be applied beyond its facts, to any case where the relief sought does not completely redress a discrete injury. But Nova Health cannot bear the weight of such a broad interpretation, and even if it could, subsequent panels of this Court have not construed the decision so broadly. See, e.g., Edmondson, 594 F.3d at 773-74 (Hartz, J., concurring and dissenting) (reading Nova Health as stating the basic proposition that potential for relief must rise above speculative level); Habecker v. Town of Estes Park, Colo., 518 F.3d 1217, 1225 (10th Cir.2008) (same). The most telling clues about the limited reach of Nova Health are found in the decision itself. To illustrate the difference between a nominally public defendant and a proper defendantthat is, between a public official who stands in the same position as a private litigant and a public official who possesses special enforcement authoritythe Nova Health court cited favorably to suits against state defendants with special enforcement powers. See Corporate Health Ins., Inc. v. Tex. Dep't of Ins., 215 F.3d 526, 532 (5th Cir.2000) (abrogated on other grounds); Mobil Oil Corp. v. Attorney Gen. of Va., 940 F.2d 73, 74-75, 76 n. 2 (4th Cir.1991). Yet in both Corporate Health and Mobil Oil, the state defendants shared enforcement authority with private litigants, with the result that favorable decisions against the state defendants could only partially relieve the plaintiff's injury, the threat of private suits still extant. In other words, in offering examples of redressable lawsuits, the Nova Health court cites two decisions whose facts were analogous to those here. Had the Nova Health court intended to state the novel proposition that the injury must be completely redressable by the requested relief, it presumably would have relied on cases where the suit could completely redress the injury. There are also several decades of Supreme Court precedent counseling against a broader reading of Nova Health. Under these precedents, redressability is satisfied when a favorable decision relieves an injury, not every injury. See, e.g., Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. at 526, 127 S.Ct. 1438; Larson, 456 U.S. at 243 n. 15, 102 S.Ct. 1673. The State tries to avoid this line of precedent by adding a gloss of its own: A favorable decision, the State argues, need not redress every injury so long as the injuries it does redress are redressed completely. Setting to one side the difficulty in applying such a rule (is the threat of multiple lawsuits a single discrete injury or a number of separate injuries?), the State cites no authority for this theory, and neglects to account for Massachusetts v. EPA , where the Court adopted the contrary conclusionstanding is proper where a favorable decision would relieve some extent of an injury. 549 U.S. at 526, 127 S.Ct. 1438. Indeed, if the law required that the requested relief afford complete redress, the Supreme Court would not have allowed Massachusetts to proceed against the EPA, as there was no guarantee a favorable decision would mitigate future environmental damage, much less redress it completely. Similarly, we would have dismissed the suit against the Attorney General in Edmondson, where the immediate and primary threat to the plaintiffs came from public employers, not the Attorney General. See 594 F.3d at 757. To recap, federal courts have consistently found a case or controversy in suits between state officials charged with enforcing a law and private parties potentially subject to enforcement. Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 188, 93 S.Ct. 739, 35 L.Ed.2d 201 (1973). So long as the plaintiff faces a credible threat of enforcement, redressability is generally not an obstacle, see Edmondson, 594 F.3d at 757, and our decision in Nova Health does not carve out an exception in cases where the state defendant shares enforcement power with private litigants. CDIA therefore had standing to sue the Attorney General for injunctive relief.