Court Opinion

ID: 9813093
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 22:55:46.680719+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:27:51.880939
License: Public Domain

LUTTIG, Circuit Judge,
with whom Judge Niemeyer joins, concurring in the judgment:
I concur in the judgment of the court, but not in its opinion. Through no fault of this court, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc., — U.S. -, 120 S.Ct. 693, 145 L.Ed.2d 610 (2000), has rendered much of the discussion in today’s opinion not merely unnecessary, but affirmatively confusing. Rather than persist in the fiction (as we do in the court’s opinion) that Laidlaw was part of the fabric of standing jurisprudence at the time of argument in this case, or worse (as we also do) that that decision *165was merely an unexceptional reaffirmation of the Court’s previous precedents, I would simply reverse the district court’s judgment on the specific reasoning of the Supreme Court in Laidlaw and say little else. The unfortunate implication left by the court’s failure to address the significant change in environmental standing doctrine worked by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Laidlaw (and by the court’s comfortable, but mistaken, assumption that the Supreme Court’s decisions prior to Laidlaio themselves dictated the conclusion we reach today), is that the district court seriously erred in its application of the standing doctrine extant at the time that it ruled — which it did not.