24
Opinion of the Court
lowed not normally sufficient by itself to confer standing); Frothingham, supra, at 488 (party may not merely assert that "he suffers in some indefinite way in common with people generally"); Perkins v. Lukens Steel Co., 310 U. S. 113, 125 (1940) (plaintiffs lack standing because they have failed to show injury to "a particular right of their own, as distinguished from the public's interest in the administration of the law"). The abstract nature of the harm—for example, injury to the interest in seeing that the law is obeyed—deprives the case of the concrete specificity that characterized those controversies which were "the traditional concern of the courts at Westminster," Coleman, 307 U. S., at 460 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting); and which today prevents a plaintiff from obtaining what would, in effect, amount to an advisory opinion. Cf. Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Haworth, 300 U. S. 227, 240-241 (1937).
Often the fact that an interest is abstract and the fact that it is widely shared go hand in hand. But their association is not invariable, and where a harm is concrete, though widely shared, the Court has found "injury in fact." See Public Citizen, 491 U. S., at 449-450 ("The fact that other citizens or groups of citizens might make the same complaint after unsuccessfully demanding disclosure . . . does not lessen [their] asserted injury"). Thus the fact that a political forum may be more readily available where an injury is widely shared (while counseling against, say, interpreting a statute as conferring standing) does not, by itself, automatically disqualify an interest for Article III purposes. Such an interest, where sufficiently concrete, may count as an "injury in fact." This conclusion seems particularly obvious where (to use a hypothetical example) large numbers of individuals suffer the same common-law injury (say, a widespread mass tort), or where large numbers of voters suffer interference with voting rights conferred by law. Cf. Lujan, supra, at 572; Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 905 (1996). We conclude that, similarly, the informational injury at issue here, di-
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