Opinion ID: 894693
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: A Question We Have Never Addressed

Text: This is the first Article VII school-finance case brought solely by school districts, without a single family or school student as plaintiff. In Edgewood I, 68 school districts and numerous individual school children and parents filed suit. [20] Edgewood II involved subsequent proceedings in the same suit with the same parties. [21] Edgewood III was brought by numerous school districts and individual citizens. [22] Edgewood IV was filed by hundreds of school districts ... as well as many parents and local officials. [23] None of these cases approved school-district standing under Article VII. Nor did they approve such standing implicitly, as standing cannot be waived and may be raised during any later appeal. [24] To the contrary, in Edgewood IV, we held that section 3 of Article VII granted no constitutional rights to school districts: Article VII, section 3 does not create any rights. It only authorizes the Legislature to establish school districts and to empower the districts to levy taxes for specific purposes. The school districts' rights, to the extent they exist, are derived solely from the statutes that the Legislature may enact under the authority granted in section 3. [25] Similarly, section 1 of Article VII does not create any rights for school districts; in fact, it does not even mention them. To the extent school districts assert injury here, they cannot do so for any violation of this constitutional right. While school districts participated in all our prior Article VII cases, their standing was immaterial because school families participated too. When several parties make the same claim for declaratory or injunctive relief, standing for some renders standing for the remainder immaterial. [26] Federal law is to the same effect. [27] As all our prior cases included parties whose sole interest was the education of their children, the State had nothing to gain by objecting to school-district standing, and the judgments would have been no different if it had. There is certainly no broad rule that a governmental entity cannot sue to declare a statute unconstitutional. [28] But there is no broad rule that they always have such standing either. Just because school districts have standing to bring some claims does not mean they have standing to bring all claims. Instead, standing depends on the nature and source of the claim being made. [29] While school districts have standing to pursue an Article VIII claim, [30] that does not mean they have standing to pursue an Article VII claim. We have never suggested otherwise, until today.