Through the standing doctrine, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken a new step toward severely limiting the effective enforcement of privacy laws. The recent Supreme Court decision, TransUnion v. Ramirez (U.S. June 25, 2021) revisits the issue of standing and privacy harms under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) that began with Spokeo v. Robins, 132 S. Ct. 1441 (2012). In TransUnion, a group of plaintiffs sued TransUnion under FCRA for falsely labeling them as potential terrorists in their credit reports. The Court concluded that only some plaintiffs had standing – those whose credit reports were disseminated. Plaintiffs whose credit reports weren’t disseminated lacked a “concrete” injury and accordingly lacked standing – even though Congress explicitly granted them a private right of action to sue for violations like this and even though a jury had found that TransUnion was at fault. In this essay, Professors Daniel J. Solove and Danielle Keats Citron engage in an extensive critique of the TransUnion case. They contend that existing standing doctrine incorrectly requires concrete harm. For most of U.S. history, standing required only an infringement on rights. Moreover, when assessing harm, the Court has a crabbed and inadequate understanding of privacy harms. Additionally, allowing courts to nullify private rights of action in federal privacy laws is a usurpation of legislative power that upends the compromises and balances that Congress establishes in laws. Private rights of action are essential enforcement mechanisms.
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected...
For the over half-million people currently homeless in the United States, the U.S. Constitution has historically provided little help: it is strongly...
This essay considers the future of public-private collaboration in the wake of the Murthy v. Missouri litigation, which cast doubt on the...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
It has been a big moment for court reform. President Biden has proposed a slate of important if vaguely defined reforms, including a new ethics regime...
For the Balkinization Symposium on Neil S. Siegel, The Collective-Action Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Neil Siegel has written a grand...
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court acknowledged the difficulties in applying its constitutional originalism to the...
This Essay expounds on the outsized role of private law in governing ownership of new technologies and data. As scholars lament gaps between law and...
In an earlier article titled The Executive Power of Removal, we contended that Article II gives the President a constitutional power to remove...
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
Privacy is a key issue in AI regulation, especially in a sensitive area such as healthcare. The United States (US) has taken a sectoral approach to...
The 2024 edition of Selected Intellectual Property, Internet, and Information Law, Statutes, Regulations, and Treaties, edited by Professors Sharon K...
We live in an age of student surveillance. Once student surveillance just involved on-campus video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines...
Fifty years ago, federal and state lawmakers called for the regulation of a criminal justice “databank” connecting federal, state, and local agencies...
Celebrating Charles Ogletree, Jr. comes naturally to so many people because he served not only as a tireless champion of equality and justice, but...
The use of autonomy to initiate force, which states may begin to view as necessary to protect against hypersonic attacks and other forms of ‘hyperwar...
In recent years, several popularly elected leaders have moved to consolidate their power by eroding checks and balances. Courts are commonly the...
Does the U.S. Constitution protect the affirmative right to vote? Those focusing on the Constitution’s text say no. Yet, the Supreme Court has treated...