Cite as: 518 U. S. 343 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
that capability, rather than the capability of turning pages in a law library, that is the touchstone.
C
Having rejected petitioners' argument that the injuries suffered by Bartholic and Harris do not count, we turn to the question whether those injuries, and the other findings of the District Court, support the injunction ordered in this case. The actual-injury requirement would hardly serve the purpose we have described above—of preventing courts from undertaking tasks assigned to the political branches— if once a plaintiff demonstrated harm from one particular inadequacy in government administration, the court were authorized to remedy all inadequacies in that administration. The remedy must of course be limited to the inadequacy that produced the injury in fact that the plaintiff has established. See Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U. S. 70, 88, 89 (1995) ("[T]he nature of the . . . remedy is to be determined by the nature and scope of the constitutional violation" (citation and internal quotation marks omitted)).
This is no less true with respect to class actions than with respect to other suits. "That a suit may be a class action . . . adds nothing to the question of standing, for even named plaintiffs who represent a class 'must allege and show that they personally have been injured, not that injury has been suffered by other, unidentified members of the class to which they belong and which they purport to represent.' " Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 426 U. S. 26, 40, n. 20 (1976), quoting Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490, 502 (1975). The general allegations of the complaint in the present case may well have sufficed to claim injury by named plaintiffs, and hence standing to demand remediation, with respect to various alleged inadequacies in the prison system, including failure to provide adequate legal assistance to non-English-speaking inmates and lockdown prisoners. That point is irrelevant now, however, for we are beyond the pleading stage.
357
Page: Index Previous 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007