Perspectives: Standing stops some suits, Supremes say

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WIKIPEDIA, Standing (law): “In law, standing means that a person is allowed to file a lawsuit in court.”

As the U. S. Supreme Court starts its 2025-26 term Monday, Oct. 6, the justices will be deciding, among other matters, which litigants are entitled to bring suit, using the doctrine of standing to determine who’s in and who’s not.

The concept of legal standing is well-known to nearly all lawyers, and even to many lay people as well. It consists of the requirement that a litigant asserting a claim must have a sufficient, legally cognizable interest or stake in the outcome of a case to warrant proceeding with a lawsuit.

The U. S. Supreme Court is fond of using this device from time-to-time to avert ruling on the merits of a case, a tenet that Chief Justice Roberts occasionally espouses during oral argument and high court rulings.

A dozen recent cases provide a broad perspective on current and prospective standing suits.

Issue illustrated

An illustration of the standing issue during the court’s 2024-25 term was the granting of a Trump administration’s emergency appeal staying a lower court ruling ordering reinstatement of some 16,000 fired federal government probationary employees on grounds that posture of the nine nonprofit organizations bringing the suit was “insufficient to support [their] standing” in U.S. Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees, 145 S.Ct. 1914 (April 8, 2025) (per curiam).

But two months later the justices found standing for fuel manufacturers challenging a waiver granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to the state of California allowing it to impose stringent restrictions on vehicle emissions.

The justices rejected another standing challenge in Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. Environmental Protection Agency, 145 S.Ct. 2121 (June 20, 2025) on grounds that as “targets,” the fuel makers should not be “locked out” from contesting regulations that may impose harm upon them in the future. This was a decision in which the oral argument portended a ruling that fuel manufacturers have standing to challenge heightened California state regulation of emissions for vehicles and electric cars imposed under a Biden era waiver from lesser federal anti-pollution standards, a holdover case from the prior administration that the Trump administration somewhat surprisingly continued to defend, ostensibly to avoid a recent ruling giving greater latitude to judicial review of governmental-imposed restrictions.

The decision that drew a sharp dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that the court was exhibiting an obedience to “moneyed interests” rather than “ordinary citizens,” which she characterized as a continuation of the tribunal’s undue favoritism of “corporate interests.” Some observers scoffed at her concerns, noting that a couple of days earlier it was revealed that she has been paid nearly $3 million from a “moneyed” publisher for her autobiography “Lovely One: A Memoir.”

The ruling, however, might be moot as Congress has enacted a measure rescinding the EPA’s waiver-granting authority.

But standing, or lack of it, is a device occasionally invoked by the Supreme Court in declining to rule on the merits of cases, as it did last year in dodging and dismissing the challenge by a group of anti-abortion physicians to the accessibility of the mifepristone pill used by many women for induced abortions. FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 692 U.S. 367 (2024). That litigation has been revived, however, and is now pending in federal court in Texas as a trio of Republican state attorneys general have taken up the cudgel. Chief Justice Roberts is a frequent questioner at oral argument of the standing of claimants, although others occasionally chime in, too.

Minnesota matters

Those cases stem from a Federal judicial requirement in Article III of the Constitution that courts hear “Cases and Controversies” has been interpreted to incorporate the concept of legal standing. There is no similar provision in Minnesota law, but common law incorporates the same principle in matters arising in this state.

A pair of significant rulings by the Minnesota Supreme Court reached similar results, including one ruling earlier this year and a prior one last year regarding this doctrine.

Although arising in different contexts, the cases both centered on the subject of standing. One involved the restoration of voting rights to felons and the other concerned a collective bargaining issue for Minneapolis school teachers.

However, the outcomes were the same in both cases, with the Supreme Court dismissing the lawsuits based on lack of standing by taxpayers.

Ballot battle

A battle over the right of felons to cast ballots was resolved in favor of a Minnesota statute enacted in 2023 that restored voting rights to most felons after completion of their incarceration in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Hunt, 10 N.W.3d 163 (2024). In its first ruling of the year, the justices unanimously rebuffed a challenge to the law brought by a conservative-oriented advocacy group that frequently challenges voting rights issues.

In a unanimous decision, with two newly appointed jurists not participating, the court upheld the measure, Minn. Stat. § 201014, subd. 2a, entitled the Minnesota Re-Enfranchisement Act, which is estimated to apply to about 60,000 Minnesotans.

The lawsuit was brought by a group of three individual taxpayers and the association to which they belong, Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA), which has contested a number of voting rights measures over the years, some successful.

This was not one of them because the Ramsey County District Court dismissed the lawsuit, and the Supreme Court, hearing the suit on an accelerated review bypassing the Court of Appeals, in a unanimous decision written by Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, affirmed the lower court determination.

Without addressing the merits, the court held that the claimants lacked standing as taxpayers because that indulgence only applies when a dispute is centered on expenditure of public funds.

Reviewing the history of taxpayer standing in Minnesota, the chief justice noted that “binding precedent on taxpayer standing is currently limited to issues of illegal expenditures.” Because the re-enfranchisement statute “does not contemplate government expenditures,” the concerns raised by the taxpayers “are incidental” to their claims for relief and, therefore, they lack standing. A contrary ruling would, the chief justice said, “render the limitations on taxpayer standing to become meaningless” by allowing unrestrained challenges to government actions that involve incidental expenditures, which are disallowed because a “taxpayer cannot manufacture standing by pointing to expenditures that are incidental to implementing the law.”

Because taxpayers lack standing, “it logically follows that their association … does not have associational standing.”

Another associational standing case was addressed this summer in Orono Oaks Volunteer Road Assoc. v. Orono Oaks Assoc., Inc., 2025 WL 2318221 (Minn. App. Aug. 11, 2025)(nonprecedential). The suit was brought by an association consisting of all homeowners in a subdivision that was established to address the failure of a nonprofit association tasked with maintenance of roads in the subdivision. The Hennepin County District Court dismissed the lawsuit for damages due to the neglected maintenance, and the Court of Appeals affirmed.

The homeowner’s association bringing the case lacked standing since the claimed damages were “specific” to the individual property owner and cannot be pursued by the association, along with denying a request for a receivership.

Reimbursement ruling

A taxpayer challenge to a provision in a collective bargaining agreement between the union representing teachers in the Minneapolis public school system and the school district also faltered on grounds of lack of standing in Clapp v. Sayles Adams, 15 N.W.3d 648 (Minn. Jan. 8, 2025).

In its first ruling of this year, the court, again unanimously in a decision written by Justice Karl Procacinni, rejected the claim by a taxpayer who lived in Minneapolis seeking to eradicate a provision in a collective bargaining agreement that included preferential provisions for a racial and ethnic teachers, which the claimant asserted violated the Equal Protection clause of Article I, section 2, of the Minnesota Constitution.

The Hennepin County District Court dismissed the case, but the appellate court reversed, leading the Supreme Court to take the opportunity to apply the requirements for taxpayer standing … that [was] recently clarified” in the Hunt case last year. True to his word, Justice Procacinni, did “resolve this case based on standing,” relying upon “the recent clarification requirements for taxpayer standing in Hunt.” In so doing, the court concluded that the “central dispute in this case did not involve unlawful disbursement of public funds and, therefore, the claimant lacks taxpayer standing.”

Standing sustained

But in another case involving public school teachers in Minnesota, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed taxpayer standing in Huizenga v. Independent School District No. 11, 44 F.4th 806 (8th Cir. 2022). The case was brought by three residents in Anoka County against a school district and the union representing teachers, concerning a teacher reimbursement plan contained in the collective bargaining agreement, which the claimants alleged violated constitutional statutory provisions.

In a per curiam decision, reversing a ruling of U.S. District Court Judge Jerry Blackwell in Minnesota, the court held that the Anoka residents had “adequately alleged that the school district taxpayers” and further identified a “municipal action” that caused injury to them, consisting of the expenditure of tax revenue by a public school district on the “allegedly illegal action” under the bargaining agreement, because the teachers are given up to 100 days of paid leave, which their union does not fully reimburse the school district for those expenses. Because Judge Blackwell had not addressed “preliminary injunction factors,” the case was sent back for determination whether injunctive relief was appropriate.

On remand, Judge Blackwell last year decided it was not and dismissed the case, again, for lack of standing under Article III of the Federal Constitution on grounds that the lawsuit did not demonstrate that municipal taxpayer funds were spent on the contested activity relied on “unclear data and unfounded assumptions, [with] … no actual expenses.” He explained that the lawsuit was premised on an argument that is “the same kind made in households every day — that wages should be higher and expenses should be lower.” That government spending “should be more, less, or allocated differently,” constituted an insufficient basis to sustain standing for the three claimant taxpayers. 727 F. Supp. 3rd 812 (D. Minn. 2024).

The organization supporting the lawsuit, the Upper Midwest Law Center, expressed that it was “disappointed” in the ruling and pledged to appeal it, again, in its commitment to “defending constitutional rights,” which it promptly did last spring, taking it up again to the Circuit Court, which again reversed Judge Blackwell. Huizenga v. Independent School District #11, 2025 WL 2302432 (August 11, 2025) (nonprecedential). By a 2-1 vote, an appellate panel ruled that two of the taxpayers who still lived in the school district had standing to proceed with the case (the other one had moved out) because they established a “direct injury” due to the “direct expenditure of district funds” to pay for substitute teachers to fill in while full-timers were engaged in the permissible non-teaching activities allowed under the union contract. The case, thus, bounced back to Judge Blackwell for a third look at the litigation, a tripling down of the Groundhog Day phenomenon. See Perspectives, “Groundhog Day recalls litigation do-overs” in the January 27, 2025, edition of Minnesota Lawyer.

Latest lawsuits

But Judge Blackwell fared better this summer in another standing dispute in Pickle v. Minnesota Association of Townships, 2025WL 1793838 (8th Cir. June 20, 2025)(nonprecedential), the 8th Circuit affirmed the dismissal on grounds of lack of standing by Judge Blackwell of the most recent of a multitude of legal actions by a group opposed to actions of a nonprofit organization of township governments. But the court held that the disposition should be without prejudice, rather than with prejudice, because the absence of standing constitutes a jurisdictional defect.

In a case decided a week earlier, the Minnesota Court of Appeals held that a sole shareholder of a consulting company aggrieved by unreasonable expenses in connection with a business project could not sue “in an individual capacity” to seek reimbursement owing to his entity. Levy v. Daily Dental Care, LLC, 2025 WL 1733444 (Minn. App. June 23, 2025)(nonprecedential). The lawsuit could not proceed because the individual owner could not sue for a claimed injury to his company, which alone was entitled to bring the claim.

The summer came to a close with a standing issue that the 8th Circuit bypassed and chose to affirm on other grounds in Swanson v. Hilgers, 2025 WL 2425192 (8th Cir. Aug. 22, 2025). The case was brought by a midwife who challenged various state law regulatory practices that she claimed were violative of her rights and those of her future patients.

But her claim was stillborn at the district court level, which dismissed her claims on the merits and refused to address the prospective patients’ claims on grounds of lack of standing. The circuit court affirmed in the merits, skipping over the standing issue, on grounds that the various challenged licensing restrictions were within the “legitimate interest of protecting health, safety, and welfare.”

To cap off the nine standing suits, the Minnesota Court of Appeals early last month upheld the standing of a labor union-related organization to sue a business offering consumers coupons and access to prescription drugs discounts on grounds that the arrangements violated Minn. Stat. § 325F.784, which governs prescription drug discount cards although it did not claim any actual damages suffered by the group. Affirming a ruling of the McCleod County District Court, the Court of Appeals upheld the standing of the organization to bring that suit because the “plain and unambiguous language” of the statute permits a suit to be brought without the claimant alleging it that it has suffered “an injury in fact” due to misleading or other improper consumer practices, directed to consumers in Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau v. GoodRx, Inc., 2025 WL 2502013 (Minn. App. Sept. 2, 2025)(nonprecedential).

Suspension standing

As the summer drew to a close the Minnesota Court of Appeals addressed standing, in a criminal case, State v. Peters, 2025 WL 2586840 (Minn. App. Sept. 8, 2025)(nonprecedential). The Polk County District Court’s dismissal of a suppressed motion in a drug possession an driving while impaired (DWI) case on grounds that the defendant lacked standing to challenge his seizure in his car by police in East Grand Forks was reversed. The district court rejected the motion because the defendant was employed in Minnesota in violation of an order from next door in North Dakota, where he lived, while leaving the state when he was on probation without court permission, which he lacked.

Lacking permission, he also lacked standing, the Polk County judge reasoned.

But the reasoning lacked a viable basis, according to the Court of Appeals, which reversed and remanded. It reasoned that the lower court’s rationale was “misguided” because the resident it ruled upon involved a seizure in a home, rather than as here, a vehicle on a public street.

The issue of standing was dispositive last month in a decision by the 8th Circuit rejecting a challenge to the Minnesota “anti-captive audience” law, Minn. Stat. §181.531 in Minnesota Chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors v. Ellison, 2025 WL 2526268_(8th Cir. 2025)(nonprecedential). Reversing a ruling of U. S. District Court Judge Patrick Schlitz, the Court by a 2-1 vote, over the dissent of Judge James Loken of Minnesota, held that the claimant business groups could not pursue a pre-enforcement challenge to the 2023 measure known as the Employer – Sponsored Meetings and Communications Act (ESMCA), one of a dozen in the country, that bars adverse action by employers against employees who decline to receive communications or participate in meetings in which management expound on political “political or religious matters,” including labor union- related issues.

The controlling two members of the panel dismissed claims grounded on the first amendment right of freedom of expression and federal labor law preemption against Gov. Tim Walz and the commissioner of the Department Of Labor And Industry. A claim against Attorney General Keith Ellison also was dismissed on grounds of sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment because he has declared that he will not enforce the law, which negates any “standing“ by the claimants to maintain the statutory challenge.

These varied cases reflect that, regardless of the merits of a lawsuit, claimants must often overcome standing barriers in order to pursue them.

RELATED: More Perspectives columns

PERSPECTIVES POINTERS

Some similar concepts to “standing”

• Ripeness: Case must be developed to the point of where judicial ruling is appropriate.
• Mootness: Dispute has already been resolved prior to litigation.
• Non-justicability: Case raises issues that do not warrant judicial intervention.

Marshall H. Tanick is an attorney with the Twin Cities law firm of MEYER NJUS TANICK LINDER & ROBBINS, P.A.