In Robins v. Spokeo, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that plaintiffs seeking to sue in federal court must have a concrete, actual injury; a mere statutory violation is not enough.
The U.S. Supreme Court remanded the case for the Ninth Circuit to determine whether the plaintiff had alleged a concrete injury.
On remand, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the plaintiff had sufficiently pled a concrete injury in fact and thus had standing to proceed with his FCRA claims. The court stated that, although a plaintiff may not show an injury-in-fact merely by pointing to a statutory violation, “some statutory violations, alone, do establish concrete harm.” To determine whether a statutory violation is itself a concrete injury, the court created a two-part test that asks (1) whether the statutory provision at issue was established to protect the consumer’s concrete interests (as opposed to purely procedural rights), and, if yes, (2) whether the specific procedural violation alleged actually harmed or presented a material risk of harm to those interests.
The Ninth Circuit noted on the first issue that the plaintiff had alleged a violation of the FCRA’s requirement that a consumer reporting agency have reasonable procedures in place to ensure the maximum possible accuracy in reporting. The court concluded that this provision “protect[s] consumers’ concrete interests” in accurate reporting and consumer privacy and that these interests are “‘real’ rather than purely legal creations.” The court reasoned that “given the ubiquity and importance of consumer reports in modern life—in employment decisions, in loan applications, in home purchases, and much more—the real-world implications of material inaccuracies in those reports seem patent on their face.” The court also noted that “the interests that FCRA protects also resemble other reputational and privacy interests that have long been protected in the law.”
With respect to the second issue, the Ninth Circuit stated that it required an “examination of the nature of the specific alleged reporting inaccuracies to ensure that they raise a real risk of harm to the concrete interests that the FCRA protects.” The court concluded that, while a benign inaccuracy may not be harmful, the plaintiff had raised a real risk of harm by alleging that the defendant had inaccurately reported that he was married, had children, was in his 50’s, was employed, had a graduate degree, and was financially stable. The court reasoned that this information “is the type that may be important to employers or others making use of a consumer report.”
The defendant argued that the plaintiff must show that the information actually harmed his employment prospects or presented a material or impending risk of doing so. The court did not buy it. The court said, “[t]he threat to a consumer’s livelihood is caused by the very existence of inaccurate information in his credit report and the likelihood that such information will be important to one of the many entities who make use of such reports.” Thus, a materially inaccurate report is itself a concrete injury.
