Supreme Court Cites Restatement of Torts in FCRA Case
In Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, an opinion delivered on May 16 by Justice Samuel Alito, the U.S. Supreme Court cited Restatement of Torts §§ 569 and 570. In that case, an individual who discovered incorrect information about himself on the search engine Spokeo, a purported consumer-reporting agency, brought a putative class action against Spokeo on behalf of himself and a group of similarly situated individuals, alleging that, by disseminating inaccurate information, Spokeo violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970.
The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the complaint for lack of standing. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, concluding that the plaintiff “adequately alleged injury in fact, a requirement for standing under Article III of the Constitution.” The Supreme Court vacated that opinion and remanded, holding that the Ninth Circuit’s “injury in fact” analysis “was incomplete” because the proper analysis “require[d] a plaintiff to allege an injury that [was] both concrete and particularized” and the Ninth Circuit’s opinion “focused on the second characteristic (particularity), but it overlooked the first (concreteness).
The Court explained that “Article III standing require[d] a concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation”—and to be “concrete” an injury had “to be ‘de facto,’ that is, to actually exist”—this did “not mean, however, that the risk of real harm [could not] satisfy the requirement of concreteness.” Rather, the Court opined that “the law has long permitted recovery by certain tort victims even if their harms [might] be difficult to prove or measure. See, e.g., Restatement (First) of Torts §§ 569 (libel), 570 (slander per se) (1938).” Consequently, the Court determined that, while it “took no position as to whether the Ninth Circuit’s ultimate conclusion—that Robins adequately alleged an injury in fact—was correct,” it would remand the case to address the “concreteness” element of the injury-in-fact analysis.
