Jeff Vagle writes:
I’m grateful for the opportunity to be a Concurring Opinions guest blogger this month. My posts will largely concentrate on the history of Article III standing for plaintiffs seeking to challenge government surveillance programs, and the flawed foundations upon which our federal standing jurisprudence rests.
Plaintiffs seeking to challenge government surveillance programs have faced long odds in federal courts, due mainly to a line of Supreme Court cases that have set a very high bar to Article III standing in these cases. The origins of this jurisprudence can be directly traced to Laird v. Tatum, a 1972 case where the Supreme Court considered the question of who could sue the government over a surveillance program, holding in a 5-4 decision that chilling effects arising “merely from the individual’s knowledge” of likely government surveillance did not constitute adequate injury to meet Article III standing requirements. Federal courts have since relied upon Laird to deny standing to plaintiffs in surveillance cases, including the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA. But the facts behind Laird illuminate a number of important reasons why it is a weak basis for surveillance standing doctrine. It is therefore a worthwhile endeavor, I think, to reexamine Laird in a post-Snowden context in order to gain a deeper understanding of the Court’s flawed standing doctrine in surveillance cases.
Read more of Part I of his series on Concurring Opinions.