Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2009

Summers v. Earth Island Institute

555 U.S. 488 | 129 S. Ct. 1142 | 173 L. Ed. 2d 1 | 2009 U.S. LEXIS 1769 | 21 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 670

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a procedural right and a broad interest in public lands do not establish standing without a named member facing a concrete, imminent injury from a specific application of the challenged policy.

Background

Congress's Forest Service Decisionmaking and Appeals Reform Act required the Forest Service to provide notice, comment, and administrative appeal procedures for proposed projects implementing forest-management plans. Forest Service regulations exempted certain categorically excluded projects from those procedures, including salvage-timber sales of 250 acres or less and certain fire-rehabilitation projects.

After a fire in Sequoia National Forest, the Forest Service approved the 238-acre Burnt Ridge salvage-timber sale without the usual notice, comment, or appeal process. Environmental organizations collectively referred to as Earth Island sued, alleging that the exemptions violated the Act. A member, Ara Marderosian, alleged that he had visited the Burnt Ridge area, planned to return, and would be harmed if the project proceeded without an opportunity to comment.

The District Court preliminarily enjoined the Burnt Ridge sale. The parties later settled their dispute over that specific project, and the District Court declared Burnt Ridge no longer at issue. Nevertheless, it held that Earth Island could continue its facial challenge, invalidated five regulations, and issued a nationwide injunction. The Ninth Circuit found challenges to several regulations unripe, but upheld the invalidation of the two regulations applied to Burnt Ridge and the nationwide injunction. The Supreme Court granted review.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Earth Island had Article III standing to seek injunctive relief against the notice, comment, and appeal exemptions after its dispute over the Burnt Ridge project was settled.

Holding

No. Once the Burnt Ridge dispute was settled, Earth Island did not identify a member facing an actual or imminent concrete injury from another application of the challenged regulations.

Reasoning

Article III limits federal courts to actual cases and controversies. A plaintiff seeking injunctive relief must show a concrete and particularized injury that is actual or imminent, fairly traceable to the challenged conduct, and likely redressable by favorable relief. This requirement prevents courts from exercising general oversight over executive action without a real need to protect a complaining party's personal interests.

Earth Island had standing to challenge the Burnt Ridge project while it remained live. Marderosian alleged that he used the specific area, planned to return, and would suffer harm to his recreational and aesthetic interests if the project proceeded without the procedural protections that might influence its design or approval. But the parties settled that project, fully remedying the injury that supported standing.

The remaining evidence did not establish imminent injury from another project. Jim Bensman's assertions that he had visited many national forests, intended to visit unnamed forests in the future, and had suffered past injuries from Forest Service development did not tie a specific planned use to a particular project subject to the challenged regulations. A generalized intention to wander through 190 million acres of national forests did not make it likely that he would encounter a qualifying project that would impair his interests.

Bensman's stated desire to return someday to areas in the Allegheny National Forest where projects were planned was likewise too indefinite. Under Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, a bare 'some day' intention, without concrete plans or a specified time, does not establish an actual or imminent injury.

Earth Island could not establish standing merely by alleging a procedural injury: denial of notice, comment, and appeal rights. A procedural deprivation supports standing only when it protects a plaintiff's separate concrete interest. Congress may relax ordinary requirements of redressability when it grants a procedural right, but it cannot eliminate Article III's irreducible requirement that the plaintiff suffer a concrete and personal injury.

Issue #2

Whether an environmental organization may establish associational standing based on the statistical likelihood that some unidentified member will be injured by future applications of the challenged regulations.

Holding

No. An organization ordinarily must identify at least one member who has suffered or will suffer the requisite concrete injury; probability based on broad membership assertions is insufficient.

Reasoning

The Court rejected the dissent's proposed probability-based approach. Assertions that organizations have numerous members who use national forests did not establish that any particular member planned to use a particular parcel affected by a project governed by the challenged procedures, or that the member's recreational interests would be harmed.

Prior standing cases require specific factual allegations, generally supported by affidavits, showing that one or more members are directly affected. The Court distinguished the narrow circumstance in which all members are affected by the challenged action, where identification of an individual member is unnecessary.

Identification also allows a court to fulfill its independent obligation to verify jurisdiction. Without member-specific evidence, the court cannot simply accept an organization's untested assertion about the number, location, plans, and interests of its members. Standing requires a factual showing of perceptible harm, not an inference that harm is statistically possible or even likely.

Issue #3

Whether the Court would consider affidavits Earth Island filed after the District Court entered judgment and after the Government filed its notice of appeal.

Holding

No. The late affidavits could not retroactively cure the absence of standing at the time of judgment.

Reasoning

Earth Island submitted additional member affidavits after the District Court had entered judgment and the Government had filed its appeal. The Court declined to consider them because a jurisdictional defect existing at judgment cannot be repaired retroactively through later factual submissions.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure concerning supplemental pleadings or joinder did not authorize respondents to alter the record in these circumstances. The Court found no support for using those rules after trial, judgment, and appeal to supply facts necessary to establish Article III jurisdiction.

Issue #4

Whether the Court should decide the Government's arguments concerning ripeness and the propriety of the nationwide injunction.

Holding

No. Having found that Earth Island lacked standing, the Court did not reach ripeness or the scope of injunctive relief.

Reasoning

Standing is a threshold jurisdictional requirement. Because no respondent established a live, concrete injury supporting the challenge after settlement of Burnt Ridge, the Court lacked authority to decide the merits, the Administrative Procedure Act ripeness question, or whether nationwide relief would have been appropriate.

Concurrences

Justice Kennedy

Reasoning

Justice Kennedy joined the Court's opinion in full. He emphasized that the claimed procedural injury had to impair a distinct concrete interest; a procedural right standing alone cannot create an Article III case or controversy.

He added that a different case might arise if Congress had identified and protected a concrete injury that otherwise would not support suit. But the Appeals Reform Act did not indicate that Congress created an interest separate from the right to notice, comment, and appeal.

Dissents

Justice Breyer

Reasoning

Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg, concluded that the organizations had shown a realistic threat of future injury. In his view, the Forest Service acknowledged that it would conduct thousands of exempt projects, while the organizations had hundreds of thousands of members who regularly use national forests and repeatedly participate in Forest Service proceedings. Those facts made future injury to at least some members realistic rather than speculative.

He read the Court's precedents to ask whether challenged conduct is realistically likely to recur and harm the plaintiff, not whether a plaintiff can identify the exact future time, location, and parcel. A credible threat of future injury may exist even when precise geographic details are unavailable, just as likely future harm in other settings need not be pinned to a particular date or GPS coordinate.

Justice Breyer regarded Bensman's affidavit as sufficient. Bensman had visited about 70 national forests, often returned to the Allegheny National Forest, commented on roughly a thousand Forest Service projects, and intended to continue doing so. Since future exempt projects were planned in a forest Bensman had used, the dissent saw a realistic threat that those projects would affect his interests.

The dissent also would have considered later-filed affidavits identifying pending projects in forests used by members. Those affidavits were submitted after the Burnt Ridge settlement made the original standing evidence less useful and after the Government first challenged standing. In Justice Breyer's view, neither Article III nor the Federal Rules barred the District Court from allowing that sensible supplementation.