Article III standing is supposed to shut the courthouse doors to ideologically motivated plaintiff s with no personal stake in their litigation and open its doors to good-faith plaintiff s with a real risk of future injury—but the doctrine sometimes does the opposite. Th at malfunction is due to three inconsistencies in standing’s imminent injury requirement: (1) courts make erratic evidentiary demands of plaintiff s alleging future injury; (2) courts unpredictably characterize the chain of inferences between the defendant’s conduct and the plaintiff ’s future injury; and (3) circuits are split about when future injury to an association’s members confers standing to the association itself.
This Comment argues that two minimally invasive doctrinal changes will promote consistency: (A) rigorously adhering to the requirement that the plaintiff ’s evidentiary burden depends on the stage of litigation and (B) making the chain of inferences end at risk of harm rather than materialized harm. Together, these changes achieve an equilibrium, ensuring that the floodgates of litigation are neither flung open nor closed completely. These changes honor standing’s separation-of-powers purpose and empower the courts to be guardians of justice.
