Cite as: 522 U. S. 479 (1998)
O'Connor, J., dissenting
498 U. S., at 524. Under the Court's approach today, however, the reporting company would have standing under the zone-of-interests test: Because the company is injured by the failure to comply with the requirement of on-the-record hearings, the company would certainly "have" an interest in enforcing the statute.
Our decision in Air Courier, likewise, cannot be squared with the Court's analysis in this action. Air Courier involved a challenge by postal employees to a decision of the Postal Service suspending its statutory monopoly over certain international mailing services. The postal employees alleged a violation of the Private Express Statutes (PES)— the provisions that codify the Service's postal monopoly— citing as their injury in fact that competition from private mailing companies adversely affected their employment opportunities. 498 U. S., at 524. We concluded that the postal employees did not have standing under the zone-of-interests test, because "the PES were not designed to protect postal employment or further postal job opportunities." Id., at 528. As with the example from National Wildlife Federation, though, the postal employees would have established standing under the Court's analysis in this action: The employees surely "had" an interest in enforcing the statutory monopoly, given that suspension of the monopoly caused injury to their employment opportunities.
In short, requiring simply that a litigant "have" an interest in enforcing the relevant statute amounts to hardly any test at all. That is why our decisions have required instead that a party "establish that the injury he complains of . . . falls within the 'zone of interests' sought to be protected by the statutory provision" in question. National Wildlife Federation, supra, at 883 (emphasis added); see Bennett, 520 U. S., at 176. In Air Courier, for instance, after noting that the asserted injury in fact was "an adverse effect on employment opportunities of postal workers," we characterized "[t]he question before us" as "whether the adverse effect on the
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