Opinion ID: 2641089
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Lujan and Our Progeny

Text: We reject Defendant Marod’s argument that recognizing Houston’s standing conflicts with the Supreme Court’s decision in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 112 S. Ct. 2130 (1992). We explain why. In Lujan, the Supreme Court considered the standing of two plaintiffs under the Endangered Species Act. 504 U.S at 562-64, 112 S. Ct. 2137-38. The first plaintiff sued to enjoin the rehabilitation of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt because of endangered Nile crocodiles. Id. at 563; 112 S. Ct. at 2138. In a 1988 affidavit, this first plaintiff stated that she had traveled to Egypt in 1986 and “‘observed the traditional habitat of the endangered [N]ile crocodile there and intends to do so again, and hopes to observe the crocodile directly.’” Id. (alterations adopted). She also swore that she intended to return and at that time would “‘suffer harm in fact 6 As noted earlier, the district court applied a four-factor test to determine whether Houston faces a real and immediate threat of future injury. Those four factors are (1) the proximity of the defendant’s business to the plaintiff’s residence; (2) the plaintiff’s past patronage of the defendant’s business; (3) the definiteness of the plaintiff’s plan to return; and (4) the frequency of the plaintiff’s travel near the defendant’s business. While we considered each of the four factors in reaching our decision today, we note that these factors are not exclusive and that no single factor is dispositive. District courts must consider the totality of all relevant facts to determine whether a plaintiff faces a real and immediate threat of future injury. 30 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 31 of 43 as the result of the American role in overseeing the rehabilitation of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile and in developing Egypt’s Master Water Plan.’” Id. (alterations adopted). The second plaintiff in Lujan sought to protect various endangered species in Sri Lanka, after having traveled there only once, in 1981. Id. When questioned about her intent to return to Sri Lanka during her deposition, the second plaintiff confessed that she had no current plans: “‘I don’t know [when]. There is a civil war going on right now. I don’t know. Not next year, I will say. In the future.’” Id. at 564; 112 S. Ct. at 2138 (alterations adopted). Indeed, except for a generalized wish to return to Egypt and Sri Lanka “in the future,” neither plaintiff offered any indication as to when they would next visit the environmental treasures they hoped to rescue. Id. at 563-64, 112 S. Ct. at 2138. The Supreme Court held that “such ‘some day’ intentions—without any description of concrete plans, or indeed even any specification of when the some day will be—do not support a finding of the ‘actual or imminent’ injury that our cases require.” Id. at 564, 112 S. Ct. at 2138. In Elend v. Basham, 471 F.3d 1199 (11th Cir. 2006), this Court relied on Lujan in affirming the district court’s dismissal for lack of standing. Elend, 471 F.3d at 1209. In Elend, the plaintiffs protested outside of the Sun Dome in Tampa when President George W. Bush attended a political rally there in 2002. Id. at 31 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 32 of 43 1202. The Secret Service ordered the plaintiffs to move to a “protest zone,” which was further away from the venue than the plaintiffs wished to be. Id. at 1202-03. The plaintiffs sought to enjoin the Secret Service from taking similar action in the future, and they claimed to have standing because they “fully intend to peacefully express their viewpoints in the future in a manner similar to their activities on November 2, 2002 in concert with presidential appearances at the . . . Sun Dome and at other locations around the country.” Id. at 1204. In Elend, this Court affirmed the district court’s dismissal for lack of standing. We explained that “the [p]laintiffs’ avowed intention to protest in a similar manner in the future is akin to the plaintiff in Lujan who declared, ‘I intend to go back to Sri Lanka [to observe endangered species], but confessed that she had no current plans: I don’t know [when].’” Elend, 471 F.3d at 1209 (quoting Lujan, 504 U.S. at 564, 112 S. Ct. at 2138). In four additional cases, this Court applied Lujan’s holding that “some day intentions” are not enough. See Nat. Parks Conservation Ass’n v. Norton, 324 F.3d 1229 (11th Cir. 2003); Fla. State Conf. of the NAACP v. Browning, 522 F.3d 1153 (11th Cir. 2008); ACLU of Fla., Inc. v. Miami-Dade Cnty. Sch. Bd., 557 F.3d 1177 (11th Cir. 2009); Harrell v. The Florida Bar, 608 F.3d 1241 (11th Cir. 2010). In all four cases, we concluded that the plaintiffs had Article III standing, given the particular facts in each case. 32 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 33 of 43 First, in Norton, two environmental organizations sued the National Park Service for violating the equal protection rights of their members by failing to evict the occupants of the Stiltsville properties (buildings on stilts in the middle of Biscayne National Park) following the expiration of the lease agreement between the occupants and the National Park Service. 324 F.3d at 1231. The plaintiffs claimed that this failure was “tantamount to the grant of an exclusive lease to the occupants.” Id. at 1234. This Court reversed the district court’s dismissal for lack of standing in Norton because the plaintiffs had visited the Biscayne Bay National Park frequently in the past and “indicated an intent to maintain the frequency of these visits in the future.” Id. at 1242. We emphasized that unlike the plaintiffs in Lujan, the plaintiffs in Norton “state with particularity that they have definite plans to continue visiting Stiltsville with precisely the same frequency that they have to date, and that in the absence of remedial action they will continue to experience the aesthetic and recreational harms described.” Id. at 1243. In Browning, we also concluded that the plaintiffs satisfied Lujan’s immediacy requirement. 522 F.3d at 1161. There, a group of voting rights organizations sued the State of Florida in September 2007, alleging that the state violated a number of their members’ constitutional and statutory rights to vote. Id. at 1158. The state required that all voter registration applicants provide 33 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 34 of 43 information, such as an address and a driver’s license number. Id. at 1156. The state would not register an applicant if the information provided by the applicant did not match the state’s own information database. Id. at 1156-57. The plaintiffs alleged that this procedure, in many cases, would leave applicants with too little time to fix the database-matching error before voter rolls closed in advance of an upcoming election. Id. In Browning, this Court affirmed the district court’s denial of the state’s motion to dismiss for lack of standing. After explaining that “[a]n imminent injury is one that is likely to occur immediately,” Browning, 522 F.3d at 1161, we noted that the plaintiffs had alleged the “denial of voter registration and hence the right to have one’s vote counted,” which would occur “before the scheduled elections in November 2008.” Id. The plaintiffs also alleged that “they intend to increase voter registration efforts and anticipate increased registration applications ahead of the upcoming presidential election.” Id. We held that these allegations satisfied Lujan’s immediacy requirement. Id. This Court reached the same conclusion in ACLU of Florida. In that case, the parent of a student sought to enjoin the school board after that board removed a certain book from the school’s library. ACLU of Fla., 557 F.3d at 1182-83. The school board argued that the parent lacked standing because she failed to present the imminent injury that Lujan requires. Id. at 1190. 34 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 35 of 43 This Court analyzed Lujan and synthesized our prior cases addressing Lujan’s immediacy requirement. We concluded that “[t]he key in all . . . of our decisions applying Lujan is that immediacy requires only that the anticipated injury occur with[in] some fixed period of time in the future.” Id. at 1193 (internal quotation marks omitted). We explained that “[i]mmediacy, in this context, means reasonably fixed and specific in time and not too far off.” Id. at 1193-94. In light of this analysis, this Court concluded in ACLU of Florida that the parent had standing. Her declaration stated that she had seen the book in question in the library with her son and “had planned to check it out and read it together [with her son] in the future.” Id. at 1194. The parent also averred that, without the requested injunction, she and her son “will not be able to [check out the book] when the school resumes on August 14, 2006.” Id. This Court noted that the parent’s declaration anticipated checking out the book on a specific date six weeks after the declaration was signed and, thus, provided “a specific intention pegged to a sufficiently fixed period of time.” Id. We concluded that “Lujan and our decisions interpreting it require no more immediacy than that.” Id. at 1195. This Court also distinguished Lujan in Harrell. The Harrell plaintiff alleged that a Florida Bar Rule prohibited the type of advertisements he wanted to run, in violation of his rights under the First Amendment. 608 F.3d at 1247. Relying on the reasoning in Lujan, the district court dismissed the case for lack of standing 35 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 36 of 43 after concluding that the plaintiff’s “claimed injury-in-fact was not sufficiently concrete or imminent because he failed to identify a date on which he proposed to run his desired advertisements.” Id. at 1260 n.7. This Court reversed because “unlike the vague, ‘some day’ intentions of the wildlife enthusiasts in Lujan to return to Egypt and observe a Nile crocodile, [the plaintiff’s] intense professional dependence on advertising makes it very likely that he will attempt to run advertisements of the kind he describes in his declaration.” Id. Applying these principles to Houston’s case before us, we conclude that our decision today is wholly consistent with the reasoning in Lujan. Plaintiff Houston’s intent to return to the Presidente Supermarket cannot be characterized as the unspecified “some day” intentions that the Supreme Court found too speculative in Lujan. 504 U.S. at 564, 112 S. Ct. at 2138. The Presidente Supermarket is neither in Egypt nor in war-torn Sri Lanka. It is located in MiamiDade County, which is next to Broward County where Houston resides. Houston shopped at the Presidente Supermarket twice in the months before filing this lawsuit, whereas the Lujan plaintiffs’ visits to Egypt or Sri-Lanka occurred several years before filing suit. Immediacy is an “elastic concept,” Lujan, 504 U.S. at 564 n.2, 112 S. Ct. at 2138 n.2, and in this context “means reasonably fixed and specific in time and not too far off,” ACLU of Fla., 557 F.3d at 1193-94. This Court held that the 36 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 37 of 43 plaintiffs in Norton, satisfied Lujan’s immediacy requirement because they had visited the Biscayne Bay Park frequently in the past and intended to do so in the future. 324 F.3d at 1243. Plaintiff Houston has traveled to Miami-Dade County on a regular basis in the past and expects to do so in the near future. Indeed, he drives right by the store on a regular basis, he entered the store on two prior occasions, and he would do so again if the store were ADA compliant. That is enough; like the plaintiffs in Norton, Houston has frequently visited the area near the store in the past and will maintain the same frequency in the future. Id. Moreover, in Harrell, this Court held that the plaintiff satisfied Lujan because his “intense professional dependence” on the activity that the defendant prohibited made it likely that he would suffer the injury again. Harrell, 608 F.3d at 1260 n.7. Given that ADA testing appears to be Houston’s avocation or at least what he does on a daily basis, the likelihood of his return for another test of the Presidente Supermarket, which is located on his routine travel route, is considerably greater than the Lujan plaintiffs’ return to far away countries with unstable political situations. See Harrell, 608 F.3d at 1260 n.7 (distinguishing Lujan by explaining that the nature of the plaintiff’s business renders the likelihood of future injury greater than the “some day” aspirations to revisit Egypt and Sri Lanka of the Lujan plaintiffs). Finally, Houston has offered the “description of concrete plans” that the 37 Case: 12-15403 Date Filed: 11/01/2013 Page: 38 of 43 Supreme Court found missing in Lujan: Plaintiff Houston visits his lawyer’s offices near the Presidente Supermarket on a frequent basis and, thus, drives by the store frequently. During these trips to his lawyer’s office in the near future, he wants to visit the store. Unlike the plaintiffs in Lujan, Houston has averred a concrete and realistic plan of when he would visit the store again. In sum, we conclude that under the specific facts in the record before us, Plaintiff Houston has standing to seek injunctive relief against Defendant Marod. We caution, however, that determining standing for injunctive relief is often a factsensitive inquiry, as it is in this case. Each plaintiff must establish standing on the facts of the case before the court. That is equally as true about a regular customer of a public accommodation as it is for a tester like Plaintiff Houston.