Court Opinion

ID: 9564731
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:05:58.259599+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:18:38.496916
License: Public Domain

GOULD, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
The most pertinent conclusion for me in this case, one that I reach after a careful *1067evaluation of the district court’s comprehensive factual findings and cogent legal analysis, is that Gordon was seeking to use the CAN-SPAM Act to build a litigation factory for his personal financial benefit. For the reasons amply explained by Judge Tallman’s fine opinion, the ways in which Gordon inserted himself into legal controversy here require conclusions that he is not an Internet access service (“IAS”) provider and that he was not adversely affected by spam. Each of these conclusions is independently sufficient to deny Gordon statutory standing to assert his claims, and each conclusion requires our affirmance of the district court’s summary judgment order.
I write separately to add this comment. In the long course of Anglo-American law, development of the common law has normally occurred in ways that gave legal remedies to persons who cried out for relief against a perceived injustice. See, e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law 37 (Dover Pubs.1991) (1881) (“[T]he various forms of liability known to modern law spring from the common ground of revenge.”). The body of the common law that we know as contract law developed from the need to provide remedies when certain promises were broken and more ancient common law writs were inadequate. See id. at 274-75 (tracing history of contracts to the writ of “trespass on the case,” which developed because “there were many cases which did not exactly fall within the definition of trespass, but for which it was proper that a remedy should be furnished”). Similarly, tort law has for centuries expanded1 to cover new types of claims where wrong had caused damage. See id. at 162-63 (stating that tort law is “continually adding to its specific rules” based on “[t]he tendency of a given act to cause harm under given circumstances,” rules “which must be determined by experience”).
In both contract and tort claims for damages, the common law always required a showing of damages proximately caused by the wrong as an element of the claim. See Hadley v. Baxendale, 9 Exch. 341 (1854) (holding that contract damages must either “aris[e] naturally” or “reasonably be supposed to have been ... the probable result of the breach of [the contract]”); Dan B. Dobbs, The Law of Torts § 377 (2001) (“In personal injury cases, the normal remedy is compensatory damages ... for all losses that have proximately resulted from the tort and all losses that will so result in the future.”). The branch of the common law known in England as chancery jurisdiction, which also developed in the colonies and in the early United States, was concerned with providing an equitable remedy to injured persons when common law damage remedies were inadequate. See Joseph Story, Chancery Jurisdiction: An Article Written for the North American Review, in 1820, on the Reports of Mr. Johnson, The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story 165 (William W. Story ed., 2000) (1852) (stating that courts of equity are necessary because “[t]here are many cases in which the parties are without remedy at law, or in which the remedy is wholly inadequate to the attainment of justice”).
Thus the common law developed ample remedies for persons who had suffered grievous harms, but, as I understand the history of our common law, it did not *1068develop remedies for people who gratuitously created circumstances that would support a legal claim and acted with the chief aim of collecting a damage award.2 See Charles T. McCormick, Law of Damages § 33 (1935) (“[T]he rules for awarding damages should be such as to discourage even persons against whom wrongs have been committed from passively suffering economic loss which could be averted by reasonable efforts, or from actively increasing such loss where prudence would require that such activity cease.”). I believe that the same principles that animated the common law influenced Congress when it enacted the CAN-SPAM Act. That Congress explicitly limited claims to a subset of individuals or entities who were “adversely affected” by the proscribed conduct shows that Congress did not aim to provide a remedy to anyone or any entity who sought out a position where the alleged harm might inevitably occur. But, for a person seeking to operate a litigation factory, the purported harm is illusory and more in the nature of manufactured circumstances in an attempt to enable a claim. In my view, manufactured claims should not be tolerated absent a clear endorsement from Congress. Such claims would not likely have been recognized at common law, and Congress here wisely excluded them.
Judge Tallman’s opinion rightly focuses on language in the legislative history stating that only bona fide IAS providers should have statutory standing. I would presume a bona fide requirement even without this legislative history because Congress provided a private right of action for CAN-SPAM violations but expressly limited it to certain individuals and entities. Given this limited private right of action, statutory standing should be denied to plaintiffs such as Gordon who purposely structure themselves to look like one of the limited entities eligible to sue but do so for the primary purpose of collecting damages and settlements from litigation. Such individuals trying to game the system do not fall into the limited class to which Congress made available a private remedy, and ordinarily they should be denied statutory standing. That the legislative history specifies bona fide IAS providers strengthens our conclusion that Gordon’s suit should be dismissed, but the legislative history is not necessary to reach this conclusion in light of the common-law antecedents that do not favor manufactured claims.
*1069There are a few areas in which our developing statutory law has embraced the concept of permitting claims by those who insert themselves in the controversy for the express purpose of creating a lawsuit. One of the best examples is that we accord standing to those who “test” for discrimination in housing by feigning interest in a housing site. See, e.g., Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 368, 373-74, 102 S.Ct. 1114, 71 L.Ed.2d 214 (1982). There may be good reasons for allowing this practice as a way to strengthen the enforcement of housing discrimination laws, and Congress provided a broad standing provision for private actors. In permitting standing for testers, the Supreme Court reasoned that Congress “conferred on all ‘persons’ a legal right to truthful information about available housing” and “plainly omitted” a “bona fide ” requirement for standing when it explicitly required one elsewhere in the same section of the fair housing statute. Id.
Similarly, we accord standing to individuals who sue defendants that fail to provide access to the disabled in public accommodation as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), even if we suspect that such plaintiffs are hunting for violations just to file lawsuits. See Molski v. Evergreen Dynasty Corp., 500 F.3d 1047, 1061-62 (9th Cir.2007) (per curiam) (“For the ADA to yield its promise of equal access for the disabled, it may indeed be necessary and desirable for committed individuals to bring serial litigation advancing the time when public accommodations will be compliant with the ADA.”). There, too, however, Congress provided standing to “any person” subjected to disability discrimination in violation of the ADA, and it also did not expressly require a showing of injury or adverse effect from the discrimination. 42 U.S.C. § 12188(a)(1); accord Molski v. M.J. Cable, Inc., 481 F.3d 724, 730 (9th Cir.2007).3
We should not extend the concept of “tester” standing to an area where we do not have confidence that Congress intended to empower anyone to make claims. Unlike the broad standing provisions in the housing discrimination laws and the ADA, here the CAN-SPAM statutory language grants a private right of action not to “all persons” regardless of injury, but only to IAS providers who suffer adverse effect. These requirements make clear that a litigation-seeking party in Gordon’s circumstances has no standing to proceed under the CAN-SPAM Act.

. An example of this expansion is seen in Judge Cardozo’s famous opinion in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916), which did much to influence the demise of the privity barrier and opened the way for claims by any person injured by a manufacturer’s negligence. See Dan B. Dobbs, The Law of Torts § 353 (2001) ("Judge Cardozo substantially abolished the privity rule for negligence cases in the famous MacPherson case....”).

. Here of course we deal with a statute, the CAN-SPAM Act, and it is sometimes thought that statutory law is separate from the common law. However, on close examination, many distinctions between common law and statutory law disappear. The English common law, for example, was built in part upon ancient statutory law which, even once it was no longer applicable, had created usages and customs from which the common law developed. See, e.g., Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England, ch. 1, (Charles M. Gray ed., 1971) (1713) ("[M]any of those Things that now obtain as Common Law, had their Original by Parliamentary Acts or Constitutions, made in Writing by the Kang, Lords and Commons; though those Acts are now either not extant, or if extant, were made before Time of Memory....”); 2 Sir William Searle Holdsworth, A History of English Law 145-46 (3d ed.1922) (discussing formation of English common law after the Norman Conquest and concluding that “the influence of the civil and canon law is perhaps the most important of all the external influences which have shaped the development of English law”). Similarly, when we consider statutory law, the United States Supreme Court has told us that we are to presume that Congress has acted with knowledge of the prior common law. See Astoria Federal Sav. and Loan Ass’n v. Solimino, 501 U.S. 104, 108, 111 S.Ct. 2166, 115 L.Ed.2d 96 (1991) (“Congress is understood to legislate against a background of common-law adjudicatory principles.”).

. Evergreen Dynasty also involved state disability claims under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, Cal. Civ.Code § 51 et seq., and the standing provisions under that statute are similarly broad. See Cal. Civ.Code § 52(a) (holding that violators of the Act are liable to "any person denied the rights” guaranteed by the Act); Botosan v. Paul McNally Realty, 216 F.3d 827, 835 (9th Cir.2000) (holding that under the Unruh Act, "proof of actual damages is not a prerequisite to recovery of statutory minimum damages”); cf. Evergreen Dynasty, 500 F.3d at 1060 n. 6 (citing cases suggesting that in general "statutory damages do not require proof of injury”).