212
There is no reason to engage in an interesting academic excursus upon the differences between mootness and standing in order to invoke this obviously applicable rule.6
Because the discussion is not essential—indeed, not even relevant—to the Court's decision, it is of limited significance. Nonetheless, I am troubled by the Court's too-hasty retreat from our characterization of mootness as "the doctrine of standing set in a time frame." Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona, 520 U. S. 43, 68, n. 22 (1997). We have repeatedly recognized that what is required for litigation to continue is essentially identical to what is required for litigation to begin: There must be a justiciable case or controversy as required by Article III. "Simply stated, a case is moot when the issues presented are no longer 'live' or the parties lack a legally cognizable interest in the outcome." Powell v. McCormack, 395 U. S. 486, 496 (1969). A court may not
for the harm of past conduct, which subsists whether future harm is threatened or not; civil penalties are privately assessable (according to the Court) to deter threatened future harm to the plaintiff. Where there is no threat to the plaintiff, he has no claim to deterrence. The proposition that impossibility of future violation does not moot the case holds true, of course, for civil-penalty suits by the government, which do not rest upon the theory that some particular future harm is being prevented.
6 The Court attempts to frame its exposition as a corrective to the Fourth Circuit, which it claims "confused mootness with standing." Ante, at 189. The Fourth Circuit's conclusion of nonjusticiability rested upon the belief (entirely correct, in my view) that the only remedy being pursued on appeal, civil penalties, would not redress FOE's claimed injury. 149 F. 3d 303, 306 (1998). While this might be characterized as a conclusion that FOE had no standing to pursue civil penalties from the outset, it can also be characterized, as it was by the Fourth Circuit, as a conclusion that, when FOE declined to appeal denial of the declaratory judgment and injunction, and appealed only the inadequacy of the civil penalties (which it had no standing to pursue) the case as a whole became moot. Given the Court's erroneous conclusion that civil penalties can redress private injury, it of course rejects both formulations—but neither of them necessitates the Court's academic discourse comparing the mootness and standing doctrines.
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