450
O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment
larly, Barrows involved the constitutional rights of the prospective victims of a racially restrictive real estate covenant, who were unidentified and thus not before the Court. See 346 U. S., at 254. And in Craig, the case from which the Court garners its sole support for according third-party standing here, the named plaintiff turned 21 during the course of the litigation, which mooted his challenge to the beer-sale restriction. See 429 U. S., at 192.
Where legitimate obstacles such as these exist, which lie beyond the control of the rightholder, that party's absence from a suit more likely stems from disability than from disinterest. A hindrance signals that the rightholder did not simply decline to bring the claim on his own behalf, but could not in fact do so. See Singleton, supra, at 116 ("If there is some genuine obstacle . . . the third party's absence from court loses its tendency to suggest that his right is not truly at stake, or truly important to him, and the party who is in court becomes by default the right's best available proponent"). Furthermore, where a hindrance impedes the assertion of a claim, the right likely will not be asserted—and thus the relevant law will not be enforced—unless the Court recognizes third-party standing. In Barrows, for example, the Court permitted third-party standing because "the reasons which underlie [the] rule denying standing to raise another's rights" were "outweighed by the need to protect the fundamental rights" which would otherwise have been denied. 346 U. S., at 257.
Moreover, in contrast to this case, the white property owner contesting the racially restrictive covenant in Barrows was its "only effective adversary" because she was "the one in whose charge and keeping repose[d] the power to continue to use her property to discriminate or to discontinue such use." Id., at 259. Here, although we have an injured party before us, the party actually discriminated against is both best suited to challenging the statute and available to undertake that task. See Gladstone, Realtors v. Village of
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