In 2022, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a pop-up coalition of anti-abortion doctors, sued the FDA to overturn the agency’s original approval of mifepristone 20 years earlier. They were represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the country’s most prominent right-wing legal groups. The doctors argued that the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone in 2002 violated the Administrative Procedures Act, as did subsequent rule changes in 2016 and 2021 that made the drug easier to obtain.
Before addressing the merits of a lawsuit, courts must always decide whether the plaintiff or plaintiffs could bring it in the first place. The Constitution requires that courts hear only “cases and controversies,” meaning that they can’t hand down mere advisory opinions. In general terms, a plaintiff has to show that they suffered some sort of injury and that the court can actually remedy it.
“As Justice Scalia memorably said, Article III requires a plaintiff to first answer a basic question: ‘What’s it to you?’” Kavanaugh wrote. “For a plaintiff to get in the federal courthouse door and obtain a judicial determination of what the governing law is, the plaintiff cannot be a mere bystander, but instead must have a ‘personal stake’ in the dispute.”
