New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

No Standing for You! (part 1)

By Gordon Hull

In one of the Seinfeld episodes, the proprietor of a popular lunch stop would deny service to customers who offended his arbitrary sensibilities with a loud “No Soup for You!” This is basically the outcome of the Supreme Court’s June decision on standing, TransUnion v. Ramirez. “Standing” in this sense refers to access to the federal legal system; to simplify, to be able to sue somebody, you need to show that you’ve suffered a “concrete” injury. A number of recent standing cases have been about the outer limits of “concrete.” In principle, privacy harms can be concrete, but SCOTUS has been making standing harder, particularly in data breach cases.

And so it goes here. Per a 5-4 opinion authored by Justice Kavanaugh, you don’t have standing to sue a credit agency for flagging you as a terrorist, unless you can show that they also disseminated that information to somebody else. This opinion explicitly overrides a Congressional determination that you do, in fact, have standing in cases like that, arrogating to the Court the right to decide when Congress is and is not allowed to establish when statutory rights are actionable. This was too much for Justice Thomas, who, joined by the court’s liberals, points out in dissent that this both violates separation of powers in the name of preserving it, and turns historical standing doctrine on its head. As Dan Solove and Danielle Citron put it in a sharp critique that builds on Thomas’ dissent, TransUnion is “an activist decision that nullifies Congress’s power to protect consumers and that enables courts to rewrite privacy laws to alter how they are enforced.”

Foucault, Marx and Prophecy Part 3: On Bureaucrats

By Gordon Hull

In a previous post, I noted that Foucault strongly implies in a 1978 interview that his communist detractors are bureaucrats, and tied that to an earlier interview with Maoists in which he suggests that structuring populist tribunals on the model of bourgeois courts would fail to break with the power structure of the bourgeois court system: the model of impartiality is intrinsically bourgeois, and so importing that model into communist popular tribunals would iterate the very power structures that were to be replaced.  Here I want to flesh out a little more some of the resonances of an accusation of bureaucracy in the context of 1970s Marx debates in France.   I should say in advance that these are notes more than a complete assessment, designed to pick out highlights.  The back and forth polemics of Marxists are byzantine, and we should all be grateful that Foucault sets it as a rule not to engage in them.  Here I will mainly draw from Trotsky’s critique of Stalin and Lenin, with a closing gesture to a representative text of the French far-left that emerged in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprisings.