Opinion ID: 721330
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Case or Controversy Limits--Standing/Ripeness

Text: 51 The panel first went wrong by concluding that the plaintiffs had standing to sue to invalidate the school prayer statute. Standing is the Article III case or controversy requirement that a plaintiff assert injury in order to sue in federal court. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 112 S.Ct. 2130, 119 L.Ed.2d 351 (1992). The doctrine of standing implements a fundamental principal of judicial restraint. 5 As Justice Powell observed, relaxation of standing requirements is directly related to the expansion of judicial power. United States v. Richardson, 418 U.S. 166, 188, 94 S.Ct. 2940, 2952, 41 L.Ed.2d 678 (1974) (Powell, J., concurring). 52 A court's decisions are hypothetical or advisory if a case presents no injury to repair. Dispense with injury, and judges may be advisors or revisers of the legislature, but they are no longer deciding live cases or controversies. Their role has expanded, their jurisdiction has drastically increased if the standing requirement diminishes. 53 In three ways, one could assert injury to the plaintiffs who sued to invalidate the Mississippi school prayer statute. Although neither the plaintiffs nor the court relied on two of the assertions, they illuminate the evanescence of the notion of injury employed by the court. 54 First, some of the plaintiffs are parents and students in Jackson, Mississippi public schools. Status alone, however, hardly connotes injury. 6 A plaintiff must be so situated to the constitutional violation as to have suffered real and immediate injury, traceable to the defendant's conduct. 7 In consequence, no parent ought to be allowed to sue over a school policy with which he disagrees unless the policy has demonstrably injured him or his child. Recognizing the frailty of this position, plaintiffs did not assert that their status alone conferred standing. 55 Second, the panel found standing because the statute makes inappropriate government involvement in religious affairs inevitable. Ingebretsen, 88 F.3d at 278 (quoting Karen B. v. Treen, 653 F.2d 897, 902 (5th Cir.1981), affirmed, 455 U.S. 913, 102 S.Ct. 1267, 71 L.Ed.2d 455 (1982)). Inevitability, like status, may suggest incipient injury, but it does not reflect an extant fact of injury. Moreover, this conclusion of inevitability reflects the panel's confusion of student-initiated prayers with state-controlled prayers. The Mississippi prayer statute authorizes but does not compel voluntary student-initiated prayer, and it expressly provides that it is to be construed consistent with First Amendment law. It is impossible to predict when or how the statute might be invoked by students. Because the statute never went in effect, no one testified how students would react to it. The school district had set no policies for its implementation, although contrary to the panel's earlier assertion, the district already forbade teachers from leading or organizing prayers and would not compel dissenting students to remain present. 56 Refuting both the status theory and inevitability theory of injury, this court has held that a plaintiff who was not an elementary student in a public school district could not attack the district's alleged policy authorizing Gideon Bible distribution in elementary schools. Doe v. Duncanville ISD, II, 70 F.3d 402 (5th Cir.1995). 8 Standing is not ordinarily, and is certainly not in this case, an arcane concept. The panel's fear that national publicity surrounding the Bishop Knox controversy would inspire a proliferation of student prayers under the new statute may or may not be valid, but fear of exposure to student-initiated prayers in the future is simply not injury. 9 57 A third concept of standing, previously articulated only in First Amendment free speech cases, attributes injury to a plaintiff's allegation that he intends to engage in protected speech or expressive conduct that may violate a statute. City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983). Relatedly, he may assert he is injured because the existence of the allegedly unconstitutional ordinance deters or chills the exercise of free speech rights and causes either continuing harm or a real and immediate threat of future injury. For obvious reasons, plaintiffs asserted neither type of injury in this case. Their free speech rights were unaffected by a policy that allows voluntary, student-initiated speech which happens to be prayerful. 58 On the contrary, the real chilling effect of the federal court's injunction falls upon students who have now been deterred from exercising their constitutional rights of free speech, assembly and religious practice in conjunction with school events. 59 One other way to look at the justiciability of this case is to say that the controversy is not ripe until allegedly unconstitutional regulations are promulgated under the statute or unconstitutional prayer occurs or is actually scheduled to occur. See 13A C. Wright, A. Miller & E. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 3532.1 (1984) (ripeness serves the central perception ... that courts should not render decisions absent a genuine need to resolve a real dispute). The court was unwilling to let events take their course under the statute and trust to the good will of students and school administrators to implement it properly. 60 Whether the panel reached the right decision on some imagined exegesis of the statute is not the issue for justiciability purposes. Rather, the question is whether these plaintiffs suffered or are in imminent danger of themselves suffering injury from the mere existence of the statute, as opposed to its particular application in the future. These plaintiffs did not sufficiently demonstrate injury. The case did not present a factual, specific dispute. The court thus acted as advisor or reviser, not as adjudicator, and rendered its decision based on a wholly hypothetical, worst-case scenario about the application of the statute.