Lack of standing is basically the way a judge says to a litigant "that's none of your business." (I just wish there was some way to apply it to legislators). I don't see how one could "restrict" it to FDA issues--it is a requirement that must be in place before one can get to any underlying issues. It is a Constitutional issue: to litigate there must be a Case and Controversy (Article III, Section 2) and courts have pretty well forever held that this must mean

1.the the plaintiff has an actual injury**, and

2. that injury an be somehow connected with the actions of the defendant, and

3. that there is is some relief available if plaintiff prevails. (The last part isn't the direct problem in this case if you accept that any court has the ability to second guess the FDA's actions without actually showing those actions were "arbitrary and capricious." In fact, the actions here were based on YEARS of data. )

The first person to whom the standing restriction was applied was apparently--George Washington. He wanted an advisory opinion about something and the court said "no can do."

(Article III is about federal courts, but it spells out just about every kind of case one could be involved in at the federal court level. I'd guess the 14th Amendment applies it to the states, but I'm not a scholar of that.)

The main aspect of standing law involved here is that plaintiffs' injury must be actual--not speculative, not "in the future". That's what has us law types so hornswoggled. There are no allegations that these plaintiffs have ever encountered the "harms" they envision. Those harms were basically "we might have to treat someone who used it even though we didn't prescribe it" and "we might have to spend time doing research about how to do that." There is, however, a law that lets doctors not have to treat on grounds of conscience, and if they don't have to, why study? As to the idea that harm might come to an "unborn person," unfortunately there were none of those as plaintiffs. Nor were there any plaintiffs who had been injured themselves by the drug. ***

A lot of fuss was made about standing when Texas took a case to the supremes about how another state (Wisconsin, I think) conducted its elections. The supremes then quite rightly said "just how is that any of your business?" That may be where the writers got the "pick and choose" idea. In fact, under the Cases and Controversies" clause judges are SUPPOSED to pick and choose and eliminate those cases that don't fit. Whether or not they fit can always be appealed. The case law is pretty consistent on what the requirements are (by case law, I mean pronouncements of appellate courts or the supremes which have precedential value).

I wasn't a litigator and so have little personal experience with the courts themselves. I SUPERVISED the outside counsel litigators for my company, but the nature of the disputes rarely if ever involved standing. I can't recall any, actually. If you can find some of those criticism of standing as "pick and choose-dom" I'd like to see them. There are some general rules beyond the basic injury idea--the one I've encountered most is that taxpayers can't sue to stop litigation just because their taxes might go up. Again, I'm not particularly expert in that side of standing.

But for the supremes to say that standing was OK in this case, they would have to abrogate the idea that the case or controversy has to involve an actual injury, not a speculative one. Imagine a neighbors suing to enjoin you from getting a third car because he MIGHT have more trouble parking on the street.

Imagine someone suing to prevent sale of X brand of cars because OTHER people had brake issues or even, IF that someone bought the car, they might have brake issues themselves. That would be an analogy to what judge Katzenjammer thought supported standing.

I will be interested how the current supremes support Judge K without opening the country wide to speculative suits base solely on their dislike of what someone else is doing.

The DOJ's brief has an excellent, if sometimes technical, discussion of standing.

The discussion starts on page 20. supremecourt.gov/Docket…

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**There CAN be cases where the human being suing is not the person harmed--that is when said human being is in a guardianship type situation representing the person harmed.

***There is a remedy for a whole lot of people injured themselves by something--it's called the class action. This people supporting this suit COULD have avoided the standing problem by getting together a bunch of women who claimed they had been harmed. I'm guessing that they couldn't FIND any who wanted to bother, at least not in that part of Texas.