Nebraska 1 and Department of Education v. The centrality of standing doctrine in contemporary U. Yet another is the shift beginning in the s toward expansive preenforcement review of agency rules. Still other reasons standing has become more central are doctrinal developments of the s, not all of which have survived on their own: easy implication of statutory causes of action, the shift to enforcing public law rights primarily through injunctions rather than damages, and the growth of structural injunctions.
All of these developments from the twentieth century put greater pressure on standing doctrine, as courts increasingly came to use it as a filter for the cases to be decided. But one more source is especially important for the centrality of standing in the twenty-first century: the role of states as litigants against the federal government. In just the last decade and a half, states have come to dominate the public law scene. States β often large coalitions of states, all represented by attorneys general from the opposite political party of the President β now file suits challenging any important action taken by the executive branch.
The last decade and a half is not normal. Measured by the yardstick of the first two centuries of constitutional cases, it is not typical for so many of our major public law cases to have names like United States v.
Texas and Biden v. The landmark decisions of our history, cases like Dred Scott v. Sawyer , have not typically had state plaintiffs. If those cases had been decided in the twenty-first century, they might have been called Massachusetts v.
Buchanan and Ohio v. Although the new state standing has transformed the federal courts and reshaped their relationship to the executive branch, these transformations might prove temporary.
