Cite as 888 F.3d 418 (9th Cir. 2018)
ports justiciability: whether the plaintiff has made out a ‘case or controversy’ between himself and the defendant within the meaning of Art. III.”); Coalition, 310 F.3d at 1157 (“At its constitutional core, standing is a manifestation of the Article III case-or-controversy requirement; it is the determination of whether a specific person is the proper party to invoke the power of a federal court.” (emphasis added) ). “[T]he core component of standing is an essential and unchanging part of the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III.” Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560, 112 S.Ct. 2130. Accordingly, the Supreme Court has “deduced a set of requirements that together make up the ‘irreducible constitutional minimum of standing.’ ” Lexmark Int’l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., – U.S. —, 134 S.Ct. 1377, 1386, 188 L.Ed.2d 392 (2014) (quoting Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560, 112 S.Ct. 2130).
Part of the Article III case-or-controversy requirement is the obvious derivative premise that “the plaintiff generally must assert his own legal rights and interests.” Warth, 422 U.S. at 499, 95 S.Ct. 2197 (citing Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U.S. 44, 46, 63 S.Ct. 493, 87 L.Ed. 603 (1943); United States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17, 21, 80 S.Ct. 519, 4 L.Ed.2d 524 (1960); Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249, 255, 73 S.Ct. 1031, 97 L.Ed. 1586 (1958) ); see also Sessions v. Morales-Santana, —— U.S. ———, 137 S.Ct. 1678, 1689, 198 L.Ed.2d 150 (2017) (“Ordinarily, a party must assert his own legal rights and cannot rest his claim to relief on the legal rights of third parties.” (alterations, internal quotation marks, and citations omitted) ); Caplin & Drysdale, Chartered v. United States, 491 U.S. 617, 623 n.3, 109 S.Ct. 2646, 105 L.Ed.2d 528 (1989) (identifying that “whether the litigant suffered some injury-in-fact, adequate to satisfy Article III’s case-or-controversy requirement” is the first of two questions the Court asks “[w]hen a person or entity seeks standing to advance the constitutional rights of others”). “This Court, as is the case with all federal courts, ‘has no jurisdiction to pronounce any statute, either of a state or of the United States, void, because irreconcilable with the constitution, except as it is called upon to adjudge the legal rights of litigants in actual controversies.’ ” Raines, 362 U.S. at 21, 80 S.Ct. 519 (emphasis added).
With only a single, narrow exception, a person filing a claim must assert a personal injury in fact[1] to establish standing. Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560–61, 112 S.Ct. 2130. This exception is next-friend standing, where a third-party—without alleging its own injury—is allowed to bring suit on behalf of the named-party, who is either (1) an incompetent or minor; or (2) unable to access the courts because of imprisonment. With next-friend standing, the party in interest has an Article III injury, but because of the disabling aspect (minority,
- ↑ Even in third-party standing (where a party has an Article III injury, but she must advance someone else’s rights to achieve redress), the plaintiff must have suffered an injury. See, e.g., Kowalski v. Tesmer, 543 U.S. 125, 129 n.2, 125 S.Ct. 564, 160 L.Ed.2d 519 (2004) (assuming without deciding that plaintiffs alleged an adequate individual injury to satisfy the “constitutional minimum of standing” before continuing to address the standards for permitting a third party “to assert the rights of another”); Lexmark Int’l, Inc., 134 S.Ct. at 1387 n.3 (noting cases articulating that the Article III basis for third-party standing is “closely related to the question whether a person in the litigant’s position will have a right of action on the claim.”) (quoting Dep’t of Labor v. Triplett, 494 U.S. 715, 721 n.**, 110 S.Ct. 1428, 108 L.Ed.2d 701 (1990) ). In this case, PETA does not (nor could it) allege either individual or third-party standing. It does not have any cognizable Article III injury for the alleged Copyright Act violations against Naruto. Hence, I do not further address either of these bases for standing.
