''Federal Election Commission v. Akins'', 524 U.S. 11 (1998), was a

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

case deciding that an individual could sue for a violation of a federal law pursuant to a statute enacted by the

U.S. Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washin ...

which created a general right to access certain

information Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random ...

Facts

The

plaintiff A plaintiff ( Π in legal shorthand) is the party who initiates a lawsuit (also known as an ''action'') before a court. By doing so, the plaintiff seeks a legal remedy. If this search is successful, the court will issue judgment in favor of t ...

s were registered voters who had asked the defendant

Federal Elections Commission The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent regulatory agency of the United States whose purpose is to enforce campaign finance law in United States federal elections. Created in 1974 through amendments to the Federal Election Cam ...

("FEC") to determine that an

organization An organization or organisation (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), see spelling differences), is an legal entity, entity—such as ...

called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee ("AIPAC") was a "

political committee Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

" subject to certain regulations and reporting requirements under the Federal Election Campaign Act, because AIPAC had crossed certain spending thresholds. The FEC determined that AIPAC had indeed crossed those thresholds, but still did not require it to make the required reports because the organization was issue-oriented, not campaign-related. The plaintiffs sought review in the District Court, which granted summary judgment for the FEC; this ruling was affirmed by a panel of the Court of Appeals, but the Court of Appeals ''en banc'' reversed. The government sought certiorari, and challenged the plaintiff's standing on the grounds that the plaintiffs had suffered no 'injury in fact'; that if the plaintiffs had any injury it was not fairly traceable to the FEC decision; and that a decision in favor of the plaintiffs would not redress their injury.

Issue

Did the plaintiffs suffer an injury in fact sufficient to establish standing?

Opinion of the Court

The Court, in an opinion by

Justice Breyer Stephen Gerald Breyer ( ; born August 15, 1938) is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and rep ...

, held that Congress has, by statute, allowed "any party aggrieved by an order of the Commission" to file a suit, which is a broad grant; not getting the requested information is an "injury in fact" just like the denial of any other information which is statutorily required to be provided to citizens by the government. The grievance is a "generalized grievance," but the harm is concrete enough to overcome this, and the harm is fairly traceable to the FEC – even though the FEC may find other grounds not to make AIPAC provide the info.''Akins'', 524 U.S. at 24 (" ere a harm is concrete, though widely shared, the Court has found 'injury in fact.'"). The Court distinguished this case from lawsuits where an individual seeks relief based on mere taxpayer standing – an insufficient ground for standing to sue. It instead employed a "zone of interests test," asking whether the injury asserted fell into the zone of interests protected by the statute. The case was remanded to the FEC to review its definition of 'members.' The Court noted that the FEC was producing new guidelines regarding this issue, which would address it and not require a new legal precedent. The plaintiffs were bitterly disappointed by the decision not to intervene, as the effort to have AIPAC legally declared a political action committee was a higher priority than the (successful) effort to show standing to have filed this lawsuit in the first place. While they repeatedly attempted filings to have the case re-opened, these were entirely rejected, and in 2010 a Federal court in D.C. ruled that the lawsuit had no merit as electoral law and it was officially and finally dismissed.

Dissent

Justice Scalia Antonin Gregory Scalia (; March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectua ...

wrote a dissenting opinion asserting that the fact the statute differentiated between 'any person' (in defining the class of persons who could file a complaint with the FEC over a violation) and 'any party aggrieved' (in defining the class of persons who could bring suit in federal court over the FEC's decision on the complaint) demonstrated the limiting force of the latter provision—anyone could file a complaint with the FEC if they believed a violation had occurred, but only parties who had actually been aggrieved (suffered a particularized injury) as a result of the FEC's decision on the complaint could sue.

References

External links