Northeastern Fla. Chapter, Associated Gen. Contractors of America v. Jacksonville, 508 U.S. 656, 8 (1993)

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Cite as: 508 U. S. 656 (1993)

Opinion of the Court

We hold that the case is not moot, and we now turn to the question on which we granted certiorari: whether petitioner has standing to challenge Jacksonville's ordinance.

III

The doctrine of standing is "an essential and unchanging part of the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III," Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560 (1992), which itself "defines with respect to the Judicial Branch the idea of separation of powers on which the Federal Government is founded," Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737, 750 (1984). It has been established by a long line of cases that a party seeking to invoke a federal court's jurisdiction must demonstrate three things: (1) "injury in fact," by which we mean an invasion of a legally protected interest that is "(a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical," Lujan, supra, at 560 (citations, footnote, and internal quotation marks omitted); (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, by which we mean that the injury "fairly can be traced to the challenged action of the defendant," and has not resulted "from the independent action of some third party not before the court," Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization, 426 U. S. 26, 41-42 (1976); and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision, by which we mean that the "prospect of obtaining relief from

Inc., 404 U. S. 412 (1972) (per curiam), and Fusari v. Steinberg, 419 U. S. 379 (1975)—both of which predate City of Mesquite—is that the statutes at issue in those cases were changed substantially, and that there was therefore no basis for concluding that the challenged conduct was being repeated. See Diffenderfer, supra, at 413-414 ("crux of [the] complaint" was that old statute violated Constitution insofar as it authorized tax exemption "for church property used primarily for commercial purposes"; new statute authorized exemption "only if the property is used predominantly for religious purposes"); Fusari, 419 U. S., at 380 (challenged statute was "significantly revised"); id., at 385 (legislature enacted "major revisions" of statute).

663

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