Opinion ID: 3215394
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Prospective Prayer Claim

Text: The district court addressed the merits of the plaintiffs’ prospective prayer claim. The court held that the revised prayer policy was constitutional and, thus, denied the plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief prohibiting all prayer at school events. The court did not discern, nor did the school district raise, any issue regarding the standing of the Does or of AHA to establish a potential harm based on future application of the revised prayer policy. At the time of the court’s judgment, the Doe children attended schools in the district that previously had endorsed prayer at school events and that were subject to the revised prayer policy. AHA therefore could have “met a challenge to” 14 standing at the time of judgment because AHA showed that at least one of its members, John Doe or Jane Doe, would suffer harm based on the revised prayer policy. See Summers, 555 U.S. at 495 n.. Because the Doe family did not move to Alabama until after the district court entered judgment in this case, AHA was not required to establish standing before entry of judgment based on the interests of its other members. Accordingly, we hold that AHA is not barred from seeking to establish that it continues to have representational standing to challenge the prospective prayer claim. We decline, however, to review AHA’s supplementary affidavits at this time to determine whether AHA continues to maintain an interest in obtaining injunctive relief based on its representation of other member parents in the district. Instead, because issues of fact arising from those affidavits may require resolution in the first instance, we remand the issue to the district court for jurisdictional discovery. See Nat. Res. Defense Council v. Pena, 147 F.3d 1012, 1024 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (remanding for jurisdictional discovery when an issue arose for the first time on appeal, and the record suggested one manner in which the party “may be able to establish” standing). For these reasons, we deny the school district’s motion to dismiss the prospective prayer claim by AHA. We vacate and remand the portion of the district court’s judgment addressing 15 this claim. On remand, the court should conduct jurisdictional discovery to determine whether AHA currently maintains standing to pursue this claim, based on the interests of its other members. If AHA continues to have a live claim, the court should also consider whether its prior judgment on the prospective prayer claim should be amended in any respect.