Connecticut Parents Union v. Russell-Tucker

Connecticut Parents Union, Plaintiff-Appellant v. Charlene Russell-Tucker, in her official capacity as Acting Commissioner, Connecticut State Department of Education, Allan B. Taylor, in his official capacity as Chairperson of the Connecticut State Department of Education’s State Board of Education, Ned Lamont, in his official capacity as Governor of Connecticut, William Tong, in his official capacity as Connecticut Attorney General, Defendants-Appellees^* Before: Cabranes and Lynch, C.JJ., and Marrero, D.J.^† On Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut   The question presented is whether the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut (Stefan R. Underhill, Chief Judge) properly dismissed the Complaint of Plaintiff-Appellant Connecticut Parents Union (“CTPU”) for lack of Article III standing. In its Complaint, CTPU alleged that Connecticut’s standards regarding the racial composition of its interdistrict magnet schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Because CTPU is an organization that is not directly regulated or affected by the challenged standards and because CTPU has failed to show that it suffered an involuntary, material burden on its core activities, we conclude that CTPU has not established an injury-in-fact for purposes of demonstrating organizational standing. Accordingly, we hold that the District Court properly dismissed the Complaint and we AFFIRM the judgment of the District Court. JOSE CABRANES, C.J. The question presented is whether the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut (Stefan R. Underhill, Chief Judge) properly dismissed the Complaint of Plaintiff-Appellant Connecticut Parents Union (“CTPU”) for lack of Article III standing. In its Complaint, CTPU alleged that Connecticut’s standards regarding the racial composition of its interdistrict magnet schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Because CTPU is an organization that is not directly regulated or affected by the challenged standards and because CTPU has failed to show that it suffered an involuntary, material burden on its core activities, we conclude that CTPU has not established an injury-in-fact for purposes of demonstrating organizational standing. Accordingly, we hold that the District Court properly dismissed the Complaint and we AFFIRM the judgment of the District Court. I. BACKGROUND The following facts are principally drawn from the Complaint, construed in the light most favorable to CTPU as the non-moving party.¹ On October 23, 2017, Dianna Wentzell, the Commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education (the “Commissioner”) issued a memorandum (the “2017 RIS Memorandum”), which implemented so-called “reduced-isolation setting standards” (the “2017 RIS”) for Connecticut’s interdistrict magnet schools pursuant to Conn. Gen. Stat. (“CGS”) §§10-264l and 10-264r.² The 2017 RIS Memorandum required that all interdistrict magnet schools in Connecticut enroll at least 25 percent non-Black and non-Hispanic students on pain of financial penalties.³ CTPU is a nonprofit advocacy group founded in 2011 “to ensure that parents, guardians, and families are connected with the educational resources and support system necessary to protect their children’s educational rights thus ensuring that neither race, zip-code, nor socio-economic status is a predictor of a child’s success.”⁴ CTPU alleges that, after the implementation of the 2017 RIS (which CTPU pointedly describes as a “hard racial quota”⁵), its president, Gwendolyn Samuel, “received many phone calls from…parents across the state” including “Black or Hispanic parents who were concerned that their children did not get into one of the magnet schools and sought guidance from [CTPU].”⁶ CPTU has vigorously protested the 2017 RIS, including by “host[ing] community events, information sessions, bus tours, and other events in order to educate the public about the statewide racial quota’s harmful effects” and “lead[ing] legislative-reform efforts to repeal the racial quota.”⁷ CTPU alleges that its “attempts to counteract the statewide quota…have ‘prevented [it] from devoting [its] time and energies to other…matters,’” imposing “opportunity costs” on the organization.⁸ On February 20, 2019, CTPU filed this Complaint against Defendants-Appellees the Commissioner; Allan B. Taylor, the Chairperson of the Connecticut State Department of Education’s State Board of Education; Ned Lamont, Governor of Connecticut; and William Tong, the Connecticut Attorney General (together, the “State”), bringing a constitutional claim under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.⁹ CTPU alleges that the 2017 RIS created a 75 percent “cap”¹⁰ on Black and Hispanic students, which denies those students equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. In its Complaint, CTPU seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, as well as attorneys’ fees and costs. The State moved to dismiss the Complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1), arguing that CTPU lacked standing to bring the action. The District Court granted the State’s motion on May 26, 2020 and dismissed the Complaint without prejudice, holding that CTPU had “not plausibly alleged that it suffered an injury ‘fairly traceable’ to [CGS §§10-264l and 10-264r] or to actions of the [State].”¹¹ Judgment entered on May 27, 2020, and CTPU timely appealed. On August 19, 2020 (the day after CTPU filed its opening brief on appeal), the Commissioner issued a new memorandum (the “2020 RIS Memorandum”), which maintained the race-based admission standards for Connecticut’s interdistrict magnet schools but eliminated monetary penalties and (assertedly) any other “negative consequences” for non-compliance with those RIS standards.¹² On appeal, in addition to arguing that CTPU lacks standing, the State argues the issuance of the 2020 RIS Memorandum moots this appeal. II. DISCUSSION “A district court properly dismisses an action under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(1) for lack of subject matter jurisdiction if the court lacks the statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate it,” such as when “the plaintiff lacks constitutional standing to bring the action.”¹³ We review de novo a district court’s dismissal of a complaint for lack of standing, “construing the complaint in plaintiff’s favor and accepting as true all material factual allegations contained therein.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, a plaintiff asserting standing must “allege facts that affirmatively and plausibly suggest that it has standing to sue” and courts “need not credit a complaint’s conclusory statements without reference to its factual context.”¹⁵ We may “consider affidavits and other materials beyond the pleadings”¹⁶ relied upon by the District Court below to resolve the issue of standing. Organizations like CTPU may have standing in one of two ways: by establishing so-called “associational” or “representational” standing to sue on behalf of its members, or by establishing that it was directly injured as an organization.¹⁷ Here, CTPU does not assert representational standing, and alleges only direct injury to itself as an organization. To succeed on that theory, it is CTPU’s burden to satisfy the “irreducible constitutional minimum of standing”¹⁸ by showing: “(i) an imminent injury in fact to itself as an organization (rather than to its members) that is distinct and palpable; (ii) that its injury is fairly traceable to [the challenged act]; and (iii) that a favorable decision would redress its injuries.”¹⁹ An organization can satisfy the injury prong if it shows that the challenged action did not merely harm its “abstract social interests” but “perceptibly impaired” its activities.²⁰ We have made clear that an organization may suffer the requisite injury when it “diverts its resources away from its [other] current activities,” or otherwise incurs “some perceptible opportunity cost.”²¹ Here, CTPU maintains that its work was perceptibly impaired because “it expend[ed] resources to counteract illegal activity touching on its core mission”²² and in so doing “divert[ed] resources away from other activities.”²³ CTPU thus argues that it sufficiently pleaded an injury-in-fact on the basis of the “opportunity costs” to the organization from its “attempts to counteract the statewide quota…[that] have ‘prevented [it] from devoting [its] time and energies to other…matters[.]‘”²⁴ We disagree. Under CTPU’s argument, an organization could establish standing by claiming to have been injured by any law or regulation touching any issue within the scope of its mission (which the organization itself can define) so long as it expends resources to oppose that law or regulation. For example, under CTPU’s theory of organizational standing, CTPU would be able to successfully plead an injury simply by pointing to any Connecticut law relating to education that it makes a significant effort to oppose. Accordingly, we reject such an expansive concept of organizational injury for standing purposes. We have held that where, as here, an organization is not directly regulated by a challenged law or regulation, it cannot establish “perceptible impairment”²⁵ absent an involuntary material burden on its established core activities. In other words, the challenged law or regulation must impose a cost (e.g., in time, money, or danger) that adversely affects one of the activities the organization regularly conducted (prior to the challenged act) in pursuit of its organizational mission. For example, we have recognized that a cognizable injury may arise via a burden that is imposed on an organization when there is an increased demand for an organization’s services.²⁶ But we think that expenditures or other activities, if incurred at the organization’s own initiative, cannot support a finding of injury — that is, when the expenditures are not reasonably necessary to continue an established core activity of the organization bringing suit, such expenditures, standing alone, are insufficient to establish an injury in fact for standing purposes. In other words, an organization’s decision to embark on categorically new activities in response to action by a putative defendant will not ordinarily suffice to show an injury for standing purposes, even if the organization’s own clients request the change. This analysis of organizational injury coheres with our decision in Centro de la Comunidad Hispana de Locust Valley v. Town of Oyster Bay,²⁷ on which CTPU heavily relies. In Centro, we held that an entity with a mission of “end[ing] the exploitation of Latino immigrant workers” and promoting the social integration of those workers by means of “community organizing, legal support, education, leadership development, and building worker cooperatives”²⁸ had sufficiently shown it had suffered an organizational injury from an ordinance that banned soliciting employment on a public right-of-way. In concluding that the organization had suffered a cognizable injury in Centro, we noted three ways in which the entity’s core activities were burdened by the challenged ordinance: (i) the ordinance would require the physical dispersal of laborers, which would impede organizing activity, one of the entity’s primary “responsibilities”;²⁹ (ii) the entity would have to “divert resources from other of its activities to combat the effects of the [challenged] [o]rdinance”³⁰ — i.e., the entity would have to expend additional resources to continue organizing after the forced dispersal of the laborers;³¹ (iii) the entity’s members would face the risk of “erroneous arrest” while conducting “advocacy activities” among the laborers, since those officials enforcing the challenged ordinance might not distinguish advocates from laborers.³² Our analysis in Centro demonstrates that the injury-in-fact inquiry should focus on the involuntary and material impacts on core activities by which the organizational mission has historically been carried out. Applying the principles we have stated, we conclude that CTPU has not met its burden to show an injury in fact. CTPU speaks loosely of its expenditures to counteract activity — that is, the 2017 RIS — “touching on” its “core mission,”³³ but fails to identify any restrictions on its ability to perform the core activities — such as meetings, lectures, and general organizing — by which it pursued its mission prior to the 2017 RIS. To the extent CTPU claims that the 2017 RIS triggered an increased demand for parent counseling, CTPU fails to sufficiently plead that any resulting costs were material.³⁴ Further, even construing the record in CTPU’s favor, as we must, it is clear that CTPU incurred costs because it decided to initiate a campaign against the 2017 RIS to advance its own “abstract social interests”;³⁵ thus any costs CPTU incurred from this campaign were not involuntary. Accordingly, because CTPU has not shown an injury in fact, we hold that CTPU lacks organizational standing. As a final matter, because we hold that CTPU lacks Article III standing, we need not consider the State’s contention that the issuance of the 2020 RIS mooted CTPU’s claims.³⁶ III. CONCLUSION To summarize: we hold that an organization that is not directly regulated or affected by a challenged law or regulation cannot establish injury-in-fact for purposes of organizational standing absent a showing that it suffered an involuntary and material burden on its established core activities. Because CTPU has not made this required showing, the District Court properly dismissed the Complaint for lack of standing without prejudice.³⁷ We thus AFFIRM the judgment of the District Court.