Cite as: 528 U. S. 167 (2000)
Scalia, J., dissenting
ing future violations. To serve this function, the amount of the civil penalty must be high enough to insure that polluters cannot simply absorb the penalty as a cost of doing business.' " App. 122, quoting PIRG v. Powell Duffryn Terminals, Inc., 720 F. Supp. 1158, 1166 (NJ 1989). When the District Court concluded the "Civil Penalty" section of its opinion with the statement that "[t]aken together, this court believes the above penalty, potential fee awards, and Laid-law's own direct and indirect litigation expenses provide adequate deterrence under the circumstances of this case," 956 F. Supp., at 611, it was obviously harking back to this general statement of what the statutorily prescribed factors (and the "as justice may require" factors, which in this case did not include particularized or even generalized deterrence) were designed to achieve. It meant no more than that the court believed the civil penalty it had prescribed met the statutory standards.
The Court points out that we have previously said " 'all civil penalties have some deterrent effect,' " ante, at 185 (quoting Hudson v. United States, 522 U. S. 93, 102 (1997)). That is unquestionably true: As a general matter, polluters as a class are deterred from violating discharge limits by the availability of civil penalties. However, none of the cases the Court cites focused on the deterrent effect of a single imposition of penalties on a particular lawbreaker. Even less did they focus on the question whether that particularized deterrent effect (if any) was enough to redress the injury of a citizen plaintiff in the sense required by Article III. They all involved penalties pursued by the government, not by citizens. See id., at 96; Department of Revenue of Mont. v. Kurth Ranch, 511 U. S. 767, 773 (1994); Tull v. United States, 481 U. S. 412, 414 (1987).
If the Court had undertaken the necessary inquiry into whether significant deterrence of the plaintiffs' feared injury was "likely," it would have had to reason something like this: Strictly speaking, no polluter is deterred by a penalty for
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