Reorganizing Organizational Standing

Abstract

The Supreme Court has established that organizations cannot get standing on terms unavailable to individuals. For decades the lower courts have nominally paid lip service to this rule while functionally ignoring it. The lower courts almost uniformly confer standing on organizations pursuant to a test that asks some variant of whether the organization (1) identified conduct which conflicts with its mission and (2) then made counter-expenditures. But a plaintiff's "mission" -- its passion, so to speak -- is constitutionally irrelevant and volitional expenditures are manipulable, self-inflicted injury. In addition to its constitutional deficiency, no Supreme Court precedent remotely authorizes this doctrine. This Article catalogs the lower courts' miscreation, outlines its illegitimacy, dispels the possibility of Supreme Court authorization and proposes a constitutionally grounded alternative for assessing organizational standing going forward.