Court Opinion

ID: 9486715
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:57:03.544246+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:53.090229
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree with the majority’s conclusion that the plaintiffs other than Dr. Patricia Knowles lack standing, and concur (with qualifications noted below) in those portions of the opinion reaching that result. Unlike the majority, however, I find Dr. Knowles’s allegations and uneontradicted affidavits adequate to satisfy both the constitutional and prudential requirements of standing. See Valley Forge College v. Americans United, 454 U.S. 464, 472, 102 S.Ct. 752, 758-59, 70 L.Ed.2d 700 (1982); Association of Data Processing Service Organizations v. Camp, 397 U.S. 150, 90 S.Ct. 827, 25 L.Ed.2d 184 (1970).
Dr. Knowles is a psychobiologist and member of the Humane Society who worked in laboratories covered by the Animal Welfare Act from 1972-1988. As a researcher who has used birds, mice and rats in the past and whose continuing research necessitates their use in the future, she explains that the exclusion of such animals from the Department’s protective regulations has adversely affected both her professional research and her sensibilities. First, she explains, the exemption “impairfs] her ability to perform professional duties,” because the ill treatment of experimental animals in the institutions where she has worked has caused the loss of “hundreds of data points” when her animal subjects were deprived of food, water, a clean cage or a temperate environment. Second, the mistreatment has caused her “personal distress” at “witnessing the plight of [the mistreated] animals”. Her affidavit includes graphic depictions of the spectacle of pigeons injured or killed in the process of being weighed in cans too small for their bodies.
The majority does not pass on whether Dr. Knowles’s injuries amount to “injury in fact”, and, as there may be doubt, I should explain why I believe they do. They are, as required by Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 104 S.Ct. 3315, 82 L.Ed.2d 556 (1984), “distinct and palpable and not abstract or conjectural or hypothetical”. Id. at 751, 104 S.Ct. at 3324 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The delay and possible frustration of professional research experiments — like having experimental test tubes knocked over— seems about as concrete an injury as one can imagine. Dr. Knowles’s interest in not seeing animals mistreated before her very eyes is also enough. Decisions of the Supreme Court make clear that the satisfactions of watching animals in their natural habitat are concrete enough for Article III purposes. In Japan Whaling Association v. American Cetacean Society, 478 U.S. 221, 106 S.Ct. 2860, 92 L.Ed.2d 166 (1986), for example, the Court found that animal protection groups, which sought to require the Secretary of Commerce to certify Japan’s refusal to abide by whaling quotas, had alleged “a sufficient ‘injury in fact’ in that the whale watching and studying of their members will be adversely affected by continued whale harvesting”. Id. at 231 n. 4, 106 S.Ct. at 2867 n. 4, citing Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 669, 92 S.Ct. 1232, 31 L.Ed.2d 569 (1972), and United States v. SCRAP, 412 U.S. 669, 93 S.Ct. 2405, 37 L.Ed.2d 254 (1973). More recently, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, — U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 2130, 119 L.Ed.2d 351 (1992), the Court said that “the desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely aesthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing”, id. — U.S. at -, 112 S.Ct. at 2137 (emphasis added); it denied standing only because of the improbability that members of the plaintiff organization would ever be in a position to suffer the deprivation. See also Animal Welfare Institute v. Kreps, 561 F.2d 1002, 1007 (D.C.Cir.1977) (finding injury in impairment of plaintiffs’ aesthetic interest in studying Cape fur seals in their natural habitat).
*505Neither our eases nor those of the Supreme Court deal precisely with the injury to a plaintiffs sensibilities from seeing the suffering of animals that are within the plaintiffs view simply because of her work, but their principles seem to embrace that injury. Japan Whaling Association and Defenders of Wildlife clearly recognize people’s affirmative aesthetic interest in viewing animals enjoying their natural habitat. The gulf between seeing experimental animals decently treated and seeing them cruelly treated seems every bit as great as that between seeing animals savoring their natural habitat and not seeing them at all; if there is any difference between the two types of loss, the former would seem more acute. Our own cases have indicated a recognition of people’s interest in seeing animals free from inhumane treatment. In Animal Welfare Institute we expressly noted the plaintiff organizations’ allegation that their members asserted an interest in seeing the seals “alive in their natural habitat under conditions in which the animals are not subject to ... inhumane treatment”, 561 F.2d at 1007, and then identified their aesthetic interests as among those protected, id., presumably thereby embracing the interest in seeing animals free from inhumane treatment. See also Humane Society of the United States v. Hodel, 840 F.2d 45, 52 (D.C.Cir.1988) (recognizing interest in avoiding exposure to animals killed by hunters). Although in both those cases it appears that the individuals were drawn to the sites by an affirmative interest in wildlife, I can see no reason why the viewer’s purpose in being near the animals should make a difference (at least so long as the injury is not a self-inflicted wound, endured for the purpose of generating standing).
Here the majority does not find Dr. Knowles’s injury “actual or imminent”, as required by cases demanding a conflict that is real and immediate, or “certainly impending”. Defenders of Wildlife, — U.S. at -n. 2, 112 S.Ct. at 2138-39 n. 2 (1992); City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983); Whitmore v. Arkansas, 495 U.S. 149, 158, 110 S.Ct. 1717, 1724-25,109 L.Ed.2d 135 (1990); Redden v. ICC, 956 F.2d 302, 306-07 (D.C.Cir.1992). Although the ease is close, I think the future injury adequately assured. It is true that “past exposure to illegal conduct does not in itself show a present case or controversy regarding injunctive relief ... if unaccompanied by any continuing, present, adverse effects”, although “[p]ast wrongs” are “evidence bearing on whether there is a real and immediate threat of repeated injury.” Lyons, 461 U.S. at 102, 103 S.Ct. at 1665 (emphasis added, quotation marks and citations omitted); see also Halkin v. Helms, 690 F.2d 977, 1005 (D.C.Cir.1982) (dismissing claim for injunctive relief against CIA for past unconstitutional surveillance where government had ceased the operation).1 Thus, while Dr. Knowles’s animal research from 1972 to 1988 is probative of whether her future injury is imminent, it does not “in itself’ establish the requisite imminence. More is necessary.
And there is more. Dr. Knowles unequivocally asserts that she “will be required to engage in further research”, and that the research “will necessitate using rats and mice in some follow-up research to my doctoral dissertation and in other psyehobiologieal research I have planned.”2 The reality of this *506requirement and planning is backed by Dr. Knowles’s personal history — the years she has devoted to securing her doctorate and the 16 years spent in research in laboratories covered by the Animal Welfare Act. The “requirement” is, to be sure, contingent — on her choosing not to abandon the human capital accumulated in securing her doctorate and in her further pursuit of psychobiological research. Although she interrupted her research in 1988 for undisclosed reasons,3 the record gives no basis for believing that she intends any such abandonment.
Her future injury is thus far more assured than that of the plaintiffs in Defenders of Wildlife. They expressed only a nebulous future intent to return to the foreign habitats of the endangered species, with no idea of when or how this trip might occur; upon being questioned about a possible trip to Sri Lanka, one affiant admitted “I don’t know [when]. There is a civil war going on right now. I don’t know. Not next year, I will say. In the future.” Defenders of Wildlife, — U.S. at-, 112 S.Ct. at 2138. Both named plaintiffs in Defenders of Wildlife had only spotty records of foreign travel to support the inference they would return, and neither had actually witnessed the endangered animals on the excursions they had made before the challenged FWA regulation took effect. —— U.S. at-, 112 S.Ct. at 2138. Dr. Knowles, on the other hand, states that she “will be required” to engage in future research that she has already planned; as failure to do so would require her to forego virtually all future return on her sizable investment in psychobiological research, I see no reason to doubt her claim.
For these reasons, I believe Dr. Knowles’s stated injuries adequate to permit review of the Department’s decisions and dissent from so much of the court’s opinion as finds them inadequate.
As to the standing of other plaintiffs, a couple of caveats to the majority opinion: First, I see no need to rely upon United States Nat. Bank of Or. v. Independent Ins. Agents of America, — U.S.-,-, 113 S.Ct. 2178, 2178, 124 L.Ed.2d 402 (1993), to reject the possibility that the government waived its challenge to standing based on the plaintiffs’ failure to fall within the “zone of interests”. The zone of interests test is jurisdictional, so that it is our duty to consider the issue regardless of the defendants’ failure to raise the issue in this court (as in this ease) or in the trial court. See, e.g., National Wildlife Federation v. United States, 626 F.2d 917, 924 n. 13 (D.C.Cir.1980) (“Because standing implicates our jurisdiction under Article III, and also is pertinent to self-imposed prudential limitations on our jurisdiction, [ ] Vaiver’ is necessarily ineffective”); see also Amalgamated Transit Union v. Skinner, 894 F.2d 1362, 1366 (D.C.Cir.1990) (investigating zone of interests challenge “[f]or the first time on appeal”). Air Courier Conference v. American Postal Workers Union, 498 U.S. 517, 111 S.Ct. 913, 112 L.Ed.2d 1125 (1991), is not to the contrary. There the Court found waiver of a claim that a specific statute exempted the Post Office from the APA (and thus from its judicial review provisions), saying that “[wjhether a cause of action exists [the exemption issue] is not a question of jurisdiction”. Id. at 523 n. 3, 111 S.Ct. at 917 n. 3. It did not suggest that any standing questions were not jurisdictional.
Second, I do not understand the majority opinion to conclude that the oversight committees established by the Animal Welfare Act necessarily would have standing were they to allege an informational injury be*507cause of “evident congressional intent to entrust to the committees the functions of oversight and the dissemination of information”, Maj.Op. at 503. The observation of International Primate Protection League v. Institute for Behavioral Research, 799 F.2d 934, 940 (4th Cir.1986), that the statutory “goals were not to be realized through a succession of private lawsuits”, if correct, suggests quite a different view. The question is best left for another day.

. This inquiry resembles a mootness analysis, where courts must ascertain whether past injury is “capable of repetition”. See, e.g., Christian Knights of the KKK v. District of Columbia, 972 F.2d 365 (D.C.Cir.1992) (finding injury capable of repetition where KKK only alleged a future intention to again march in Washington, D.C. with no concrete plans to do so in the near future). The "capable of repetition” doctrine does not apply in this case, however, because Dr. Knowles separated from the covered labs before the suit was filed; if her prior injury became moot before she sued, likelihood of repetition would not save it. Renne v. Geary, 501 U.S. 312, 320, 111 S.Ct. 2331, 2338, 115 L.Ed.2d 288 (1991) (mootness exception for disputes capable of repetition “will not revive a dispute which became moot before the action commenced").

. Note that it is not necessary for Dr. Knowles to accept employment with a covered laboratory, contrary to the majority’s concern, Maj.Op. at 500 n. 3, in order to subject herself to the injury to her professional research. Because all distributors of laboratory animals (excepting retail pet stores) are covered by the Act, 7 U.S.C. § 2132(f), inhumane treatment of any animals she would purchase for any research she might conduct privately would establish a sufficient in*506jury. Cf. Hazardous Waste Treatment Council v. U.S.E.P.A., 861 F.2d 277, 282 (D.C.Cir.1988) (standing based on costs imposed on purchaser of wastes because lax regulation increased likelihood of contamination of wastes purchased).

. It may well be that Dr. Knowles left the laboratory environment to avoid exposure to the suffering of animals, in which case the Department's rule is inflicting a current injury, forcing her to choose between a sacrifice of career goals and continued exposure to inhumane treatment. However, because the party invoking jurisdiction must allege and support each element of standing, Defenders of Wildlife, U.S. at-, 112 S.Ct. at 2136-37, we cannot rely on this possibility.