Court Opinion

ID: 9807121
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 19:50:02.76628+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:25:41.173374
License: Public Domain

KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Kimberly Pisinski is an attorney. She has brought a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The majority opinion holds that she lacks standing. I respectfully disagree. In my view, Pisinski has standing. She contracts with a company known as Morgan Drexen and works together with Morgan Drexen employees to provide debt settlement and bankruptcy services to consumers who are in debt. These services are intended to help people in debt negotiate better terms with their creditors. Consumers are charged a fee for some of these services. The Bureau claims that the kind of services in which Pisinski and Morgan Drexen engage — with an up-front fee paid by consumers — is illegal. The Bureau therefore is regulating a business that Pisinski engages in. That is enough for standing. We have a tendency to make standing law more complicated than it needs to be. When a regulated party such as Pisinski challenges the legality of the regulating agency or of a regulation issued by that agency, “there is ordinarily little question” that the party has standing, as the Supreme Court has indicated. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 561-62, 112 S.Ct. 2130, 119 L.Ed.2d 351 (1992). So it is here.