Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. v. Jamison, Civ. A. No. 82-2763.

• Citation: 787 F. Supp. 231
• Decision Date: 06 June 1990
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 82-2763.
• Parties: NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al., Plaintiffs, v. Delos Cy JAMISON, et al., Defendants, and National Coal Association/American Mining Congress, et al., Intervenor-Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Columbia

787 F. Supp. 231

NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al., Plaintiffs, v. Delos Cy JAMISON, et al., Defendants, and National Coal Association/American Mining Congress, et al., Intervenor-Defendants.

Civ. A. No. 82-2763.

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

June 6, 1990.

Lloyd Thomas Galloway, Galloway & Greenberg, Eldon VanCleef Greenberg, Garvey, Schubert & Barer, Hope M. Babcock, National Audubon Soc., General Counsel, John D. Echeverria, Glenn P. Sugameli, Norman Leon Dean, Jr., Washington, D.C., for plaintiffs.

Alfred Thomas Ghiorzi, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Environment & Natural Resources Div., Washington, D.C., for defendants.

Timothy Biddle, Cromwell & Moring, Warner Gardner, Shea & Gardner, Washington, D.C., David S. Hemenway, Peabody Holding Co., Inc., St. Louis, Mo., Eugene D. Gulland, Covington & Burling, Allan W. Anderson, Gerry Levenberg, Steven P. Quarles, Crowell & Moring, Washington, D.C., for intervenor-defendants.

MEMORANDUM

BRYANT, District Judge.

The issue of plaintiffs' standing to bring this suit is once again before this court, having granted, on November 9, 1989, plaintiffs' motion for reconsideration of the court's November 1, 1988 grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants on the grounds that plaintiffs failed to show that they had standing to maintain this action. Plaintiffs, various environmental groups and organizations of residents of western states, have filed fifteen affidavits and a memorandum in support of their standing to pursue their challenge to certain rules promulgated by the Department of the Interior ("Department") in July 1982 and February 1986. The rules amend a number of 1979 regulations, which govern the national program for the management, which includes leasing and mining, of federally-owned coal.

Defendants have moved again for summary judgment in their favor on all claims except as to the Departmental rules regarding "surface owner" consent. Defendants base their motion upon their interpretation of the burden of proof at this juncture, which they assert requires plaintiffs to prove that the evidence advanced to support standing demonstrate injury-in-fact, causation, and redressability. In this regard, defendants argue that plaintiffs alleged injuries are too remote, speculative, and vague to provide plaintiffs with standing to bring their claims and to confer upon the court Article III jurisdiction.

Standing Doctrine

The question of standing demands a determination of "whether the litigant is entitled to have the court decide the merits of the dispute or of particular issues." Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 498, 95 S.Ct. 2197, 2205, 45 L.Ed.2d 343 (1975). Standing involves justiciability limitations imposed by the "case or controversy" requirement of Article III, § 2 of the Constitution and "prudential limits on its exercise." Id. Essentially, the court must determine whether the plaintiff has "alleged such a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy" so as to warrant her invocation of federal-court jurisdiction, Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204, 82 S.Ct. 691, 703, 7 L.Ed.2d 663 (1962), and "to justify exercise of the court's remedial powers on her behalf." Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. at 498-99, 95 S.Ct. at 2205. As true in 1977 as today, Judge Skelly Wright observed of these Article III requirements:

While that much remains clear and has its roots in the Constitution, application of the principle to a particular complaining party has become difficult in the wake of rapidly developing case law.

Animal Welfare Institute v. Kreps, 561 F.2d 1002, 1005 (1977). The court notes that for such reasons as these the court granted plaintiffs' motion for reconsideration.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the constitutional elements of the standing requirement "as embracing three separate, yet necessarily intertwined components: ..., (1) `some actual or threatened injury' that (2) `fairly can be traced to the challenged action' and (3) `is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision.'" National Wildlife Federation v. Hodel, 839 F.2d 694, 704 (D.C.Cir.1988) ("NWF v. Hodel") (quoting Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, 454 U.S. 464, 472, 102 S.Ct. 752, 758, 70 L.Ed.2d 700 (1982)). This requisite injury can be neither to abstract interests, e.g. Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727, 739, 92 S.Ct. 1361, 1368, 31 L.Ed.2d 636 (1972) (Mere interest in a problem is not sufficient to confer standing); Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense v. Reservists Committee to Stop the War, 418 U.S. 208, 223, n. 13, 94 S.Ct. 2925, 2933, n. 13, 41 L.Ed.2d 706 (1974) ("The abstract injury in nonobservance of the Constitution" insufficient to confer standing), nor a "generalized grievance shared in substantially equal measure by all or a large class of citizens," Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. at 499, 95 S.Ct. at 2205. See Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 754, 104 S.Ct. 3315, 3326, 82 L.Ed.2d 556 (1984) ("An asserted right to have the Government act in accordance with law is not sufficient, standing alone, to confer jurisdiction on a federal court").

This "distinct and palpable injury," Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. at 501, 95 S.Ct. at 2206, however, "need not be important or large; an `identifiable trifle' can meet the constitutional minimum." National Wildlife Federation v. Burford, 878 F.2d 422, 430 (D.C.Cir.1989) ("NWF v. Burford II") (quoting United States v. Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures ("SCRAP"), 412 U.S. 669, 689 n. 14, 93 S.Ct. 2405, 2417 n. 14, 37 L.Ed.2d 254 (1973)). Injury to aesthetic or recreational interests, environmental well-being, shared my many, will support a claim of standing. Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. at 734, 92 S.Ct. at 1366 ("Aesthetic and environmental well-being, like economic well-being, are important ingredients of the quality of life in our society, and the fact that particular environmental interests are shared by the many rather than the few does not make them less deserving of legal protection through the judicial process").

Personal injury may be "actual or threatened;" Valley Forge, 454 U.S. at 472, 102 S.Ct. at 758, and while the mere threat of an injury may appear, at first blush, to be noncognizable in a judicial system such as ours, whose jurisdiction is limited by the "cases or controversies" requirement of Article III, the Supreme Court has accommodated allegations of threatened injury in two contexts. The first of these involves cases in which the plaintiff alleges that the governmental action will be taken directly against the plaintiff. In that regard, the court must assess "the likelihood that the clash between the government and the plaintiff will in fact occur." Wilderness Society v. Griles, 824 F.2d 4, 11 (D.C.Cir. 1987) ("WS v. Griles"). The second context in which courts have deemed threatened injury sufficient to confer standing comprises cases in which the government acts directly against a third party, whose expected response will in turn injure plaintiff. In these so-called three-party cases, the determination of standing turns not on the existence of personal injury, but rather on so-called causation issues — "whether the third party's decision is sufficiently dependent upon the governmental action that plaintiff's injury is `fairly traceable' to that action and is `likely to be redressed' by an order binding the government." Id. See, e.g., Allen v. Wright; Warth v. Seldin. However, when the existence of personal injury is at issue in the three-party case, it usually turns on a determination of "how likely it is that the third party's response to the challenged governmental action will injure the plaintiff at all," WS v. Griles, 824 F.2d at 12 (emphasis in original), — occurring in the same location as the third party's response to the challenged governmental action, in cases involving putative environmental injuries, id. at 15.

The second prong of the standing inquiry is causation. This "logical nexus" requirement, Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83, 102, 88 S.Ct. 1942, 1953-54, 20 L.Ed.2d 947 (1968), has not, however, been uniformly interpreted. Compare Flast, 392 U.S. at 102, 88 S.Ct. at 1953-54 (Taxpayer must establish logical nexus between "status and type of legislative enactment attacked" and "status and the precise nature of the constitutional infringement"), with Schlesinger, 418 U.S. at 225 n. 15, 94 S.Ct. at 2934 n. 15 ("Flast nexus test is not applicable where the taxing and spending power is not challenged"). As discussed, supra, in the context of three-party cases, the "mere indirectness of causation is no barrier to standing, and thus, an injury worked on one party by another through a third party intermediary may suffice." NWF v. Hodel, 839 F.2d at 705. This Circuit has held: "We are concerned here not with the length of the chain of causation, but on sic the plausibility of the links that comprise the chain." Public Citizen v. Lock-heed Aircraft Corporation, 565 F.2d 708, 717 n. 31 (D.C.Cir.1977).

The final prong of current constitutional standing analysis is redressability. "Redressability and causation analysis often replicate one another, particularly in cases where, as here, the relief requested is merely the cessation of illegal conduct." NWF v. Hodel, 839 F.2d at 705. Courts have interpreted this requirement to have been fulfilled when plaintiff has demonstrated that a favorable decision is likely to redress his injury — "a party seeking judicial relief need not show to a certainty that a favorable decision will redress his injury." NWF v. Hodel, 839 F.2d at 705. See Hazardous Waste Treatment Council v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 861 F.2d 270, 273 (D.C.Cir.1988) ("Our decision (favorable to the plaintiff) is at least a necessary first step on a path that could ultimately lead to relief fully redressing plaintiff's injury").

As to the prudential limits on the court's exercise of its jurisdiction,...