Court Opinion

ID: 9475762
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:37:08.95761+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:54.624064
License: Public Domain

BUCKLEY, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
As the Supreme Court recently acknowledged, “the constitutional component of standing doctrine incorporates concepts concededly not susceptible of precise definition,” and which “cannot be defined so as to make application of the constitutional standing requirement a mechanical exercise.” Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 751, 104 S.Ct. 3315, 3325, 82 L.Ed.2d 556 (1984). Thus when confronted with this difficult area of constitutional law, we are invited to participate in a process of “gradual clarification ... through judicial application,” with particular attention, in each case, to an “examination of a complaint’s allegations to ascertain whether the particular plaintiff is entitled to an adjudication of the particular claims asserted.” Id. at 752, 104 S.Ct. at 3325.
This process will at times entail the extrapolation of evolving constitutional principles for application to novel situations. Inevitably, the occasion will arise when judges are required to go beyond explicit Supreme Court precedent, as Judge Bork acknowledges to be the case with his examination of causation. While I am fully in accord with his conclusion that the Haitian Refugee Center has failed to demonstrate article III standing, I believe an alternative analysis of the causation requirement is more readily inferred from Supreme Court precedent. Accordingly, I will limit my discussion to the constitutional element of the HRC’s standing. I fully concur in Judge Bork’s analysis of the individual appellants’ lack of article III standing, and in his analysis of all appellants’ lack of standing under prudential principles.
I.
I begin with the beginning; namely, the HRC’s claim of injury. In its complaint, *817tire Center alleges that its “purpose, as set forth in its by-laws, is to promote the well-being of Haitian refugees through appropriate programs and activities, including legal representation of Haitian refugees, education regarding legal and civil rights, orientation, acculturation, and social and referral services.” Complaint at 10, J.A. at 13. It further alleges that it “has been directly injured by the interdiction program in that its organizational purpose has been thwarted.” Complaint at 16, J.A. at 19. These are the specific allegations on which this court must assess the Center’s organizational standing. Fortunately, we are dealing with one of the rare areas of the law of standing in which a clear pattern appears to be emerging, one that finds its most recent expression by this court in Action Alliance of Senior Citizens v. Heckler, 789 F.2d 931 (D.C.Cir.1986). In that case, we noted:
The appellants before us devote themselves to the service of senior citizens and rest their claims on programmatic concerns, not on wholly speculative or purely ideological interests in the agency’s action. (Citations omitted.) Their complaint identifies concrete organizational interests detrimentally affected by the particular HHS regulatory disposi-. tions they challenge____
AASC pleads the same type of injury as the plaintiffs in Havens Realty: the challenged regulations deny the AASC organizations access to information and avenues of redress they wish to use in their routine information-dispensing, counseling, and referral activities. Unlike the “mere ‘interest in a problem’ ” or ideological injury in Sierra Club [v. Morton], 405 U.S. [727] at 735, 739, 92 S.Ct. [1361] at 1366, 1368 [31 L.Ed.2d 636 (1972) ], the AASC organizations have alleged inhibition of their daily operations, an injury both concrete and specific to the work in which they are engaged.
Id. at 937-38.
This language echoes the principle laid down in Warth v. Seldin, to wit, that an association “may have standing in its own right to seek judicial relief from injury to itself and to vindicate whatever rights and immunities the association itself may enjoy.” 422 U.S. 490, 511, 95 S.Ct. 2197, 2211, 45 L.Ed.2d 343 (1975) (emphasis added). See Anti-Fascist Committee v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, 140-41, 71 S.Ct. 624, 632-33, 95 L.Ed. 817 (1951) (“The touchstone to justiciability is injury to a legally protected right and the right of a bona fide charitable organization to carry on its work, free from [harassment], is such a right.”) (Burton, J.). See also id. at 183-84, 71 S.Ct. at 654-55 (The practice complained of “deprives the organizations themselves of no legal right or immunity. By it they are not dissolved, subjected to any legal prosecution, punished, penalized, or prohibited from carrying on any of their activities.”) (Jackson, J., concurring).
In the instant case, the HRC does not assert that appellees have interfered with its organizational ability to provide Haitians with programs and activities of the kind described in its complaint. Therefore, because of the nature of the HRC’s alleged injury, this case is clearly distinguishable from Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363,102 S.Ct. 1114, 71 L.Ed.2d 214 (1982). In Havens, the plaintiff organization, HOME, asserted that the challenged actions of the defendant realtor had frustrated its operational ability to facilitate the location and rental of suitable housing by blacks seeking its assistance. The Supreme Court agreed that HOME had incurred “concrete and demonstrable injury to the organization’s activities — with the consequent drain on the organization’s resources — [that] constitutes far more than simply a setback to the organization’s abstract social interests.” 455 U.S. at 379, 102 S.Ct. at 1124 (citation omitted).
By way of contrast, the HRC makes no claim that either its organizational activities or resources have been adversely affected by the interdiction program. It is able to pursue its organizational purpose by providing extensive services, “including legal representation of Haitian refugees, education regarding legal and civil rights, orientation, acculturation, and social and *818referral services,” to the thousands of Haitian refugees who have already arrived in America as well as others who may continue to reach our shores despite the interdiction program.* The HRC’s ability to function as an organization is not at stake.
An examination of the allegations in the complaint reveals nothing concrete to show a causal relationship between the injury claimed and the governmental action complained of. It is not as if we were dealing with a restaurant that had been cut off by a municipal roadblock from access to a portion of its potential clientele. As restaurants are organized in order to earn profits from the sale of meals and as each additional client adds to the enterprise’s revenues, the owner clearly would have standing to challenge the municipality’s action because of its impact on those revenues. The Center, however, was organized for a different purpose, and nothing in its complaint suggests that that purpose has been compromised by the President’s interdiction order. Indeed, the HRC has not alleged that a single one of its activities has been affected by a putative decrease in the number of Haitian refugees reaching U.S. territory; a failure which suggests that its concern for the plight of Haitians intercepted on the high seas comes far closer to reflecting an abstract social interest than it does the kind of concrete associational interest addressed in Warth and Action Alliance of Senior Citizens.
In fact, the alleged injury is sufficiently insulated from the action alleged to have inflicted it that the claim may well lie on the far side of the line that divides constitutionally cognizable injury from abstraction. The Supreme Court’s holding in Allen v. Wright is in point. In that case, the Court considered an action brought by a group of black parents and children seeking to enjoin Internal Revenue Service practices that allegedly granted tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. The plaintiffs alleged two injuries, the first of which may be described as a claim of “stigmatic injury” to blacks resulting from government discrimination on the basis of race. 468 U.S. at 754, 104 S.Ct. at 3326.
While the Court acknowledged that “this sort of non-economic injury is one of the most serious consequences of discriminatory government action and is sufficient in some circumstances to support standing,” it cautioned that “such injury accords a basis for standing only to ‘those persons who are personally denied equal treatment’ by the challenged discriminatory conduct.” Id. at 755, 104 S.Ct. at 3327. As plaintiffs had not alleged that they had suffered a stigmatic injury “as a direct result of having personally been denied equal treatment,” the Court concluded that their first claim of injury was not judicially cognizable. Id. at 755-56, 104 S.Ct. at 3327.
In the instant case, the claim of organizational injury may be tangible enough to meet the injury prong of the constitutional test. Yet it is alleged almost as an abstraction, because the complaint omits allegation of any direct link, causal or otherwise, between the asserted harm and the challenged actions. Thus there may be grounds to question whether the Center’s allegations meet the threshold constitutional requirement of standing despite the minimalist approach to injury to be found in United States v. SCRAP, 412 U.S. 669, 93 S.Ct. 2405, 37 L.Ed.2d 254 (1973).
II.
Even conceding injury, the Center must still meet the test of causation. In this case, the requisite showing of cause and effect will not be satisfied by speculation as to the statistical probability that one or more of the Haitian refugees intercepted by the Coast Guard might otherwise have appeared at the Center’s door in Florida. Rather, it requires a demonstration that a *819putative diminution in the number of potential clients for the HRC’s services will impair its ability to provide them. This analysis falls comfortably within the conceptual framework of the Court’s treatment of the second claim of injury in Allen v. Wright.
In support of that claim, the plaintiffs asserted that the grant of tax-exempt status to segregated private academies impeded the desegregation of public schools to the detriment of their children, who were thereby denied the advantages of an integrated education. The Supreme Court agreed that the alleged injury was judicially cognizable. 468 U.S. at 756, 104 S.Ct. at 3327. It concluded, however, that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that the injury claimed was “fairly traceable” to the practice challenged. Id. at 757, 104 S.Ct. at 3328.
The diminished ability of respondents’ children to receive a desegregated education would be fairly traceable to unlawful IRS grants of tax exemptions only if there were enough racially discriminatory private schools receiving tax exemptions in respondents’ communities for withdrawal of those exemptions to make an appreciable difference in public school integration. Respondents have made no such allegation.
Id. at 758, 104 S.Ct. at 3328.
In the case before us, the HRC has failed to indicate how the interdiction program would make an appreciable difference in its ability to serve the Haitian refugee community. One searches the complaint in vain for a description of even a single program within the scope of its organizational purpose with which the interdiction program is ostensibly interfering. In the absence of more concrete allegations, I can discern no chain of causation between the interdiction program and a harm to the HRC’s “organizational purpose,” nothing to suggest that the HRC would be able to prove that any of the activities listed in its complaint has been appreciably affected by the program. Therefore I cannot conclude that the HRC has satisfied the causation requirement of article III.
This analysis is faithful to the Court’s admonition to examine the complaint’s allegations to determine the existence of a justiciable controversy and, more concretely, is consistent with the Court’s reasoning in Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 95 S.Ct. 2197, 45 L.Ed.2d 343 (1975). There the Court considered a challenge to a zoning ordinance of the town of Penfield, New York. Individuals of low income alleged that they had been denied affordable housing in Penfield as a result of the ordinance. While they alleged that their desire to find affordable housing was being thwarted by the ordinance, here the HRC alleges that its desire to help Haitian refugees is being thwarted by the interdiction program. The Warth Court denied the individual petitioners standing because they had failed, “in any concretely demonstrable way,” to establish causation.
Petitioners must allege facts from which it reasonably could be inferred that, absent the respondents’ restrictive zoning practices, there is a substantia] probability that they would have been able to purchase or lease in Penfield____ We find the record devoid of the necessary allegations____ [N]one of these petitioners has a present interest in any Penfield property; none is himself subject to the ordinance’s strictures; and none has ever been denied a variance or permit by respondent officials. Instead, petitioners claim that respondents’ enforcement of the ordinance against third parties — developers, builders, and the like — has had the consequence of precluding the construction of housing suitable to their needs at prices they might be able to afford. The fact that the harm to petitioners may have resulted indirectly does not in itself preclude standing____ But it may make it substantially more difficult to meet the minimum requirement of Art. Ill: to establish that, in fact, the asserted injury was the consequence of the defendants’ actions, or that prospective relief will remove the harm.
Id. at 504-05, 95 S.Ct. at 2208 (citations omitted). Nothing alleged by the HRC *820suggests even remotely that there is any probability, let alone a substantial one, that the imposition or lifting of the interdiction program had or would have an appreciable impact on its activities.
III.
As this analysis falls well within the limits of recent Supreme Court precedent, I feel it represents a surer basis for affirming the Center’s lack of article III standing than does Judge Bork’s, relying as it does on inferences to be drawn from recent Supreme Court cases rather than on their explicit holdings. As stated at the outset, I concur in the other elements of Judge Bork’s analysis of appellants’ standing.

At the inception of the interdiction program, Haitians were entering the United States illegally at an estimated rate of up to 20,000 a year. Coast Guard Oversight — Part 2: Hearings on Military Readiness and International Programs Before the Subcomm. on Coast Guard and Navigation of the House Comm, on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. 13 (1981) (statement of David Hiller, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, Dept, of Justice).