esqappellate
President, MSI
- Feb 12, 2012
- 7,408
If one plaintiff is said to have standing, and others are said to not have standing, do the ones that don't have standing get dropped from the case? I think the answer "no".
Every plaintiff is still in the case. The rule is that only one plaintiff need have standing. That is why the court expressly stated that it need not consider the standing of MSI and the individual plaintiffs once it concluded that Atlantic Guns had standing:
“[T]he Supreme Court has made it clear that the presence of one party with standing is sufficient to satisfy Article III’s case-or-controversy requirement.” Bostic v. Schaefer, 760 F.3d 352, 370 (4th Cir. 2014) (internal quotation marks omitted). Consequently, once it is established that at least one party has standing to bring the claim, no further inquiry is required as to another party’s standing to bring that claim. Horne v. Flores, 557 U.S. 433, 446–47 (2009) (declining to analyze whether additional plaintiffs had standing when one plaintiff did); Watt v. Energy Action Educ. Found., 454 U.S. 151, 160 (1981) (“Because we find [one plaintiff] has standing, we do not consider the standing of the other plaintiffs.”).