Cite as: 524 U. S. 11 (1998)
Scalia, J., dissenting
wrong to think that generalized grievances have only concerned us when they are abstract. One need go no further than Richardson to prove that—unless the Court believes that deprivation of information is an abstract injury, in which event this case could be disposed of on that much broader ground.
What is noticeably lacking in the Court's discussion of our generalized-grievance jurisprudence is all reference to two words that have figured in it prominently: "particularized" and "undifferentiated." See Richardson, supra, at 177; Lujan, 504 U. S., at 560, and n. 1. "Particularized" means that "the injury must affect the plaintiff in a personal and individual way." Id., at 560, n. 1. If the effect is "undifferentiated and common to all members of the public," Richardson, supra, at 177 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted), the plaintiff has a "generalized grievance" that must be pursued by political, rather than judicial, means. These terms explain why it is a gross oversimplification to reduce the concept of a generalized grievance to nothing more than "the fact that [the grievance] is widely shared," ante, at 25, thereby enabling the concept to be dismissed as a standing principle by such examples as "large numbers of individuals suffer[ing] the same common-law injury (say, a widespread mass tort), or . . . large numbers of voters suffer[ing] interference with voting rights conferred by law," ante, at 24. The exemplified injuries are widely shared, to be sure, but each individual suffers a particularized and differentiated harm. One tort victim suffers a burnt leg, another a burnt arm—or even if both suffer burnt arms they are different arms. One voter suffers the deprivation of his franchise, another the deprivation of hers. With the generalized grievance, on the other hand, the injury or deprivation is not only widely shared but it is undifferentiated. The harm caused to Mr. Richardson by the alleged disregard of the Statement-of-Accounts Clause was precisely the same as the harm caused to everyone else: unavailability of a de-
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