U.S. Supreme Court Grants Cert. in Robins v. Spokeo

On April 27, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to grant review of a Ninth Circuit decision addressing what constitutes “actual injury” for purposes of Article III standing. See Robins v. Spokeo, Inc., 742 F.3d 409 (9th Cir. 2014), cert. granted, 2015 U.S. LEXIS 2947 (U.S. Apr. 27, 2015) (No. 13-1339) (available here).

In Robins, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a statutory violation alone is sufficient to confer Article III standing on a plaintiff in a case brought under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), 15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq. The Robins plaintiff had filed a class action lawsuit against Spokeo—a “people search engine” website that aggregates personal information from public sources—alleging that the site willfully violated the FCRA by posting inaccurate information about him. In its petition to the Supreme Court, Spokeo broadly framed the question presented as whether Congress can confer Article III standing “in the absence of any allegation of concrete and particularized injury.” But Robins contends that he sufficiently alleged actual injuries caused by the dissemination of incorrect personal information, including financial and emotional injuries. Deepak Gupta of Gupta Beck PLLC, who is representing Robins, analogized FCRA violations to defamation in a recent interview with Law360: “If I say something false about you and put it in the world, you have a claim against me, and that’s a particularized claim you have, and there’s always been standing under those circumstances.”

The Office of the Solicitor General strongly opposes Spokeo’s position, and filed a brief in March at the request of the Court, arguing that Spokeo’s petition should be denied because “public dissemination of inaccurate personal information about the plaintiff is a form of ‘concrete harm’ that courts have traditionally acted to redress, whether or not the plaintiff can prove some further consequential injury.”

While both the plaintiff and defense bars anxiously await the resolution of this case, the Court still might choose to punt on this issue, as it has twice in the recent past. In First American Financial Corp. v. Edwards, 132 S. Ct. 2536 (2012), and First Nat’l Bank of Wahoo v. Charvat, 134 S. Ct. 1515 (2014), the Court avoided deciding similar issues that would limit the right of consumers to seek redress for statutory violations by corporations. Cert. was denied in Charvat, but in Edwards, the Court initially granted cert. then dismissed it as improvidently granted. It remains to be seen whether Robins will meet a similar fate.