“On August 28, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in Obama v. Klayman, ruled for the government in the ongoing litigation over the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) telephone metadata program. The Klayman ruling, while arising out of the context of the government’s foreign intelligence gathering powers, did not opine on the constitutionality of the NSA’s program. Instead, the decision focused on the procedural prerequisites necessary for a federal court to exercise jurisdiction over the case in the first place. Specifically, the appeals court ruled that the Klayman plaintiffs lacked standing to obtain a preliminary order barring the NSA from continuing the telephone metadata program. Arising from the D.C. District Court’s issuance of a preliminary injunction against the telephone metadata program in December of 2013, the recent ruling from the D.C. Circuit comes after the short term lapse and subsequent 180-day reauthorization of the statutory authority supporting the telephone metadata program. Central to the case is the issue of constitutional standing, embodied in Article III of the Constitution, which provides that federal courts generally can act only in the context of a “case-or-controversy.” That language that has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to require that a person seeking judicial relief from an Article III court have a genuine stake in a case ( i.e. , an injury-in-fact that is caused by the illegal action and is redressable by the judicial relief sought). Pursuant to the 2013 Supreme Court’s ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International, a plaintiff seeking injunctive relief to stop unlawful government conduct bears the burden of proving that a concrete and particularized injury is “certainly impending” as a result of the allegedly unlawful government action…”
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.