1970—“Generalizations about standing to sue are largely worthless as such.” That’s the ominous beginning of Justice William O. Douglas’s unanimous opinion in Association of Data Processing Service Organizations v. Camp, and it gets worse after that.
Douglas takes the Administrative Procedure Act’s grant of standing to a person “adversely affected or aggrieved by agency action within the meaning of a relevant statute” and expands it into a grant of standing to anyone who identifies any interest—whether “aesthetic,” “conservational,” “recreational,” “spiritual,” or economic—that is “arguably within the zone of interests to be protected by the statute … in question.”
As then-D.C. Circuit judge Antonin Scalia will observe in a 1983 law-review article, “It is difficult to exaggerate the effect which this interpretation of the ‘adversely affected or aggrieved’ portion of the APA had had upon the ability of the courts to review administrative action.”