Sierra Club v. Morton

Infobox SCOTUS case
Litigants = Sierra Club v. Morton
ArgueDate = November 17
ArgueYear = 1971
DecideDate = April 19
DecideYear = 1972
FullName = Sierra Club v. Rogers Clark Ballard Morton, Secretary of the Interior, et al.
USVol = 405
USPage = 727
Citation =
Prior =
Subsequent =
Holding = A person has standing to seek judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act only if he can show that he himself has suffered or will suffer injury, whether economic or otherwise. In this case, where petitioner asserted no individualized harm to itself or its members, it lacked standing to maintain the action.
SCOTUS = 1972-1975
Majority = Stewart
JoinMajority = Burger, White, Marshall
Dissent = Douglas
Dissent2 = Brennan
Dissent3 = Blackmun
NotParticipating = Powell, Rehnquist
LawsApplied =

"Sierra Club v. Morton", ussc|405|727|1972, is a famous United States Supreme Court case on the issue of standing in environmental lawsuits.

Environmental standing

The suit arose when the United States Forest Service permitted development of Mineral King near Sequoia National Park. The key issue in the case was whether the permitted development would cause the Sierra Club sufficient injury to give them standing to sue to block the permit. The Supreme Court held that the Sierra Club, in its corporate capacity, lacked standing, but that it may sue on behalf of any of its members who had individual standing because the government action affected their aesthetic or recreational interests.

Although the Sierra Club lost the case, as a practical matter they won the war. All any environmental group needs to assert standing in a natural resource matter is to find among their membership a single person with a particularized interest (e.g. one who hikes, hunts, fishes, or camps in or near the affected area).

Douglas's dissent

"Sierra Club v. Morton" is, perhaps, best known for the dissenting opinion by William O. Douglas who asserted that natural resources ought to have standing to sue for their own protection. An excerpt from his dissent:

cquote|The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole - a creature of ecclesiastical law - is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases. The ordinary corporation is a "person" for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes.

So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water - whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger - must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which are threatened with destruction.....

The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled. That does not mean that the judiciary takes over the managerial functions from the federal agency. It merely means that before these priceless bits of Americana (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.

Perhaps they will not win. Perhaps the bulldozers of "progress" will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present question. The sole question is, who has standing to be heard?

Those who hike the Appalachian Trail into Sunfish Pond, New Jersey, and camp or sleep there, or run the Allagash in Maine, or climb the Guadalupes in West Texas, or who canoe and portage the Quetico Superior in Minnesota, certainly should have standing to defend those natural wonders before courts or agencies, though they live 3,000 miles away. Those who merely are caught up in environmental news or propaganda and flock to defend these waters or areas may be treated differently. That is why these environmental issues should be tendered by the inanimate object itself. Then there will be assurances that all of the forms of life which it represents will stand before the court - the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams. Those inarticulate members of the ecological group cannot speak. But those people who have so frequented the place as to know its values and wonders will be able to speak for the entire ecological community.....

That, as I see it, is the issue of "standing" in the present case and controversy.

ee also

* List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 405

Further reading

* cite journal | last = Schrepfer | first = Susan R. | authorlink = | coauthors = | year = 1989 | month = | title = Establishing Administrative ‘Standing’: The Sierra Club and the Forest Service, 1897-1956 | journal = The Pacific Historical Review | volume = 58 | issue = 1 | pages = 55–81 | doi = 10.2307/3641077 | url = | accessdate = | quote =