Academic

In APCC Services, the Supreme Court today held that assignees of claims had standing to pursue those claims in federal court, even if they have promised to remit the proceeds of the litigation to the assignors.  It is interesting because it a. was a 5-4, b. was a case where Kennedy swung "liberal," and c. marks a new round in the important fight to broaden standing requirements.

Such requirements often turn on injury, and the question was whether the assignee of a claim could really be said to suffer injury if any proceeds on the claim would go to the assignor.  In answering the question in the affirmative, the majority may have been (indeed in some cases explicitly was) thinking about all the cases where the driving party behind litigation is not the injured plaintiff, but the incentivized lawyer: qui tam, contingency fee, patent assignees, guardians ad litem and so on.

When you read a lot of standing cases, you start looking for markers for future fights over the doctrine, because those fights take up ever larger amounts of the time of the federal courts.  There are two markers of particular note in this opinion.  First: "We have often said that history and tradition offer a meaningful guide to the types of cases that Article III empowers federal courts to consider."  So plaintiffs seeking standing are invited to look to past practice, rather than the strictures of the standing test, to make their case for plaintiffhood.

Second, there's some disdain for ticky-tack and technical denials of standing - much needed disdain in my view, but I could see future litigants argue "why should we have to jump through a silly and easy to jump through hoop?  Just award us standing."  See if you agree: "Were we to agree with petitioners that the aggregators lack standing, our holding could easily be overcome. For example, the agreement could be rewritten to give the aggregator a tiny portion of the assigned claim itself, perhaps only a dollar or two. Or the payphone operators might assign all of their claims to a ?Dial-Around Compensation Trust? and then pay a trustee (perhaps the aggregator) to bring suit on behalf of the trust."