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jjk166 2 hours ago

Why shouldn't B have standing? They presumably are residents of and taxpayers to city C, and they face property devaluation stemming from nearby municipal actions.

s1artibartfast 2 hours ago | parent [-]

you dont have standing from indirect harm or costs.

waynecochran an hour ago | parent [-]

What is the legal precedent for this statement? I am not disagreeing, I just would like to know what the law is.

everforward an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It would generally be the opposite, what law gives them standing to sue?

My knowledge as a non-lawyer generally agrees with above, most states won’t allow you to sue for neighbors doing something legal that decreases your property value (CA is the exception I’m aware of, and even then it’s a “sometimes” kind of thing).

I’m not even sure who they’d sue. Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things. You could sue the city to try to prevent the zoning, but sovereign immunity would preclude suing them for doing their job (zoning, in this case).

pessimizer 4 minutes ago | parent [-]

> neighbors doing something legal

The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.

The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.

> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.

If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.

The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."

edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.

akramachamarei an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) the requirements for standing were developed in the Constitution and elaborated in some later cases. To quote from the article, the apt criteria seem to me (2 of the 3):

1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.

2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46] ---

The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.

akramachamarei an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Update: this is the most up-to-date info I could find: Case 15-25-00202-CV

https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...

Pamela Griffin, Ralph Griffin, Michelle Griffin, Corey Griffin, Individually and as Trustee of The Griffin Revocable Living Trust, and Polly Randle

v.

NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC

But the records only go up to February 20th.

mothballed 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

There was an interesting case Knife Rights v Garland (v1) where they determined you also don't have standing for imminent jeopardy if no one has done the imminent thing in decades in a way that results in criminal rather than just mere economic damages. This is why those in danger of getting a felony for interstate commerce of switchblades are unable to challenge the law because it's not considered an injury to merely have your business destroyed and your inventory seized.

mrhottakes an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There isn't a single precedent; standing and jurisdiction are like 70% of civil procedure in law school. This page is a good jumping off point: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/standing

tptacek 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

Right, standing seems like a series of technicalities until you realize it's fundamentally what keeps judges from becoming philosopher-kings that control the entire rest of the government: judges only exercise power in actual cases and controversies between formally-identified parties.