Opinion ID: 2570177
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Injury in Fact

Text: {11} Of most significance in the instant case is the injury in fact requirement. Injury in fact has evolved in New Mexico jurisprudence in response to developments in federal law that created a more flexible standard, departing from older, more formalistic notions of a legally protected interest. See De Vargas Sav. & Loan Ass'n v. Campbell, 87 N.M. 469, 471, 535 P.2d 1320, 1323 (1975) (noting that [t]he flaw in the `legal interest' test is that it requires a court to examine the merits of a case, while the purpose of the standing question is quite distinctto protect against improper plaintiffs). In De Vargas, this Court established the contours of the modern injury in fact standard that has since guided New Mexico courts. We noted that, though New Mexico has always required allegations of direct injury to the complainant to confer standing, ... once the party seeking review alleges he himself is among the injured, the extent of injury can be very slight. Id. at 472, 535 P.2d at 1323. Moreover, we have held that a litigant need not suffer the actual effects of the challenged action or statute, such as arrest and prosecution under a criminal statute, to meet the injury in fact requirement. See ACLU v. City of Albuquerque (ACLU I), 1999-NMSC-044, ¶ 9, 128 N.M. 315, 992 P.2d 866. Rather, the litigant need only show that he is imminently threatened with injury, De Vargas, 87 N.M. at 473, 535 P.2d at 1324, or, put another way, that he is faced with a real risk of future injury, as a result of the challenged action or statute. Corn v. N.M. Educators Fed. Credit Union, 119 N.M. 199, 202, 889 P.2d 234, 237 (Ct.App.1995), overruled on other grounds by Trujillo v. City of Albuquerque, 1998-NMSC-031, 125 N.M. 721, 965 P.2d 305. {12} Further, like federal law, our courts have allowed organizations to sue if their individual members would have standing in their own right. See, e.g., Nat'l Trust for Historic Pres. v. City of Albuquerque, 117 N.M. 590, 594, 874 P.2d 798, 802 (Ct.App. 1994). We have also held that a litigant may bring an action on behalf of a third party if the litigant demonstrates the following three criteria: (1) the litigant has suffered an `injury in fact,' thus giving him or her a `sufficiently concrete interest' in the outcome of the issue in dispute; (2) the litigant has a close relation to the third party; and (3) there exists some hindrance to the third party's ability to protect his or her interests. N.M. Right to Choose/NARAL, 1999-NMSC-005, ¶ 13, 126 N.M. 788, 975 P.2d 841 ( quoting Powers v. Ohio, 499 U.S. 400, 411, 111 S.Ct. 1364, 113 L.Ed.2d 411 (1991)). As discussed previously, the great public importance doctrine exists as an overarching exception to all of these general standing requirements, allowing this Court to reach the merits of a case even when the traditional criteria for standing are not met, either by an individual or an organizational plaintiff. {13} Plaintiffs' suggested prudential factors are an amalgamation of the above principles, with the notable absence of the three traditional, federally-derived standing requirements that form the jurisdictional threshold in federal courts. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560-61, 112 S.Ct. 2130, 119 L.Ed.2d 351 (1992) (stating that U.S. Supreme Court precedent establishes the injury in fact, causation, and redressability elements as the irreducible constitutional minimum of standing). Plaintiffs argue that those three elements have been roundly criticized by the commentators in ways that should give this Court pause over the wisdom of their wholesale adoption as state prudential standards. As to the injury in fact element, Plaintiffs state that it is a singularly unhelpful, even incoherent, addition to the law of standing, but do not offer an explanation as to why that is so. With regard to the causation component, Plaintiffs assert that it is much too closely tied to the merits, and fosters the criticism that federal standing is not principled, but just a way of pre-judging the merits while avoiding the merits. Finally, regarding the redressability element, Plaintiffs maintain that the difficulty in explaining the difference between causation and redressability seems to confound even the Supreme Court. {14} While we acknowledge the criticisms of the causation and redressability components, we are mainly concerned here with the injury in fact requirement, as that is the point upon which this case turns when the traditional three-prong test is applied. [3] Indeed, Plaintiffs implicitly recognize this by making the elimination of the injury in fact element the focal point of their suggested approach. In place of the requirement that a litigant show a direct injury that is actual or imminent, Plaintiffs would substitute an inquiry into the degree or magnitude of the potential harm to an individual if an injury were to occurthe challenged ordinance were to be enforced unconstitutionallyand the seriousness of the constitutional issues involved. {15} In support of their contention that courts should look to the magnitude of potential harm instead of the threat of injury to a particular plaintiff, Plaintiffs cite to two New Mexico cases in which they assert the court found standing based on the seriousness of the potential injury. In De Vargas, the state supervisor of the banking department granted authority to a Los Alamos building and loan association to operate an office in Santa Fe. 87 N.M. at 470, 535 P.2d at 1321. Several Santa Fe savings and loan associations challenged the supervisor's decision, claiming that they would suffer undue competitive injury if another office was allowed to operate in Santa Fe. Id. at 470, 473, 535 P.2d at 1321, 1324. This Court found that the alleged injuries were sufficient for the Santa Fe savings and loan associations to attain standing as associations aggrieved and directly affected by the banking department's order. Id. at 473, 535 P.2d at 1324. {16} In Corn, a workers compensation claimant challenged the attorneys' fees cap in the Workers Compensation Act, claiming that it violated the equal protection clause. 119 N.M. at 201, 889 P.2d at 236. The defendant claimed that the worker could not demonstrate a direct threat of injury from the application of the attorneys' fees cap to her case because she was still represented by counsel. Id. at 202, 889 P.2d at 237. The Court of Appeals disagreed, finding that the case was seriously contested and of above-average complexity, and thus, the worker could have been required to pursue matters of impairment and permanent disability without the aid of counsel because the cap prohibits her from compensating counsel any further. Id. The court refused to take a rigid approach to the concept of standing by requiring that the worker actually proceed without counsel, and suffer prejudice as a result, before she can raise a constitutional challenge to the attorneys' fees cap. Id. Thus, the court held that the worker had sufficiently demonstrated a real risk of future injury due to the attorneys' fees cap to comply with the injury in fact requirement for standing. Id. {17} Plaintiffs claim that at the core of the holdings in De Vargas and Corn was the court's consideration that the potential injury could be very serious. In other words, if the potential harm is of sufficient magnitude, then the threat of such harm to some unknown person will be sufficient to confer standing without requiring a direct injury, either actual or imminent, to a particular plaintiff. With respect, we think Plaintiffs misread these opinions. {18} Both De Vargas and Corn explicitly focused on the direct nature of the threat of harm to the particular plaintiff, not the magnitude of that harm. Indeed, both courts expressly recognized that, once the plaintiff has alleged that he is among those who are directly injured or imminently threatened with injury, the alleged injury itself need only be slight. De Vargas, 87 N.M. at 472, 535 P.2d at 1323; Corn, 119 N.M. at 202, 889 P.2d at 237. In asserting that De Vargas and Corn support an injury in fact standard that evaluates the magnitude of potential injury rather than the direct nature of the threat to the particular plaintiff, Plaintiffs overlook the fact that the threat of harm in those cases was real and significant and was directly traceable to the individual plaintiffs that were bringing suit; it was not a general, undifferentiated threat of a hypothetical harm to some unidentifiable person. Thus, we do not find support in these cases for Plaintiffs' position that the injury in fact element should not remain part of our standing analysis. {19} Though we recognize there may be difficulties with the injury in fact requirement in certain cases, we decline Plaintiffs' invitation to do away with that element as part of our general approach to standing, particularly as applied in the instant case. Requiring that the party bringing suit show that he is injured or threatened with injury in a direct and concrete way serves well-established goals of sound judicial policy. See Wis. Bankers Ass'n v. Mut. Sav. & Loan Ass'n, 96 Wis.2d 438, 291 N.W.2d 869, 875 n. 1 (1980) (noting that Wisconsin courts generally require that a plaintiff possess standing not as a jurisdictional prerequisite but rather as a matter of sound judicial policy). As Justice Kennedy explained in his concurrence in Lujan: While it does not matter how many persons have been injured by the challenged action, the party bringing suit must show that the action injures him in a concrete and personal way. This requirement is not just an empty formality. It preserves the vitality of the adversarial process by assuring both that the parties before the court have an actual, as opposed to a professed, stake in the outcome, and that the legal questions presented ... will be resolved, not in the rarified atmosphere of a debating society, but in a concrete factual context conducive to a realistic appreciation of the consequences of judicial action. 504 U.S. at 581, 112 S.Ct. 2130 (quoted authority omitted). By establishing injury in fact as part of a general approach to standing, our state court justiciability policies serve [t]he values of avoiding unnecessary constitutional determinations and establishing proper relationships between the judiciary and other branches of the ... government. 13A Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 3532.1, at 120 (2d ed. 1984) (quoted authority omitted). {20} Beyond the strength of the policies underlying the three-prong approach to standing, and particularly the injury in fact requirement, that approach is deeply ingrained in New Mexico jurisprudence. To abandon a test that has essentially formed the basis of New Mexico's entire body of case law on standing, a body of law that has extensive historical roots, would require a highly compelling reason for doing so. Plaintiffs simply do not supply us with such a reason. That the federal approach is grounded in Article III constraints which do not apply to our state courts is not enough to persuade us to change course. Nor do Plaintiffs adequately explain how their suggested prudential factors can be applied in any principled way by lower courts to avoid eviscerating the standing requirement. {21} Plaintiffs' approach seems to exchange a rule-based system that, though perhaps subject to criticism, at least contains standards with identifiable contours and boundaries, for an impulse-based, visceral type of evaluation. Thus, if lower courts were directed to evaluate the seriousness of the potential harm, which Plaintiffs essentially define as any constitutional harm, and the public importance of the issue to determine standing, it is difficult to see how the ultimate determination would not be merely a reflection of the whim of the particular judge. Without a more concrete explanation of how Plaintiffs' proposed factors provide meaningful and predictable guidelines for determining whether a particular plaintiff has standing to sue, we will not deviate from New Mexico's time-honored approach which overall has served us well. {22} To clarify, we do not reject outright Plaintiffs' prudential factors. As noted previously, each of those factors is already incorporated in some fashion into our current approach to standing, and are helpful points for guidance and analysis. We only reject those factors as surrogates for injury in fact. Because we do not adopt Plaintiffs' proposed prudential factors for determining standing, and instead elect to maintain the basic legal framework set out in our prior standing case law, we now apply that framework to the current case.