[Photo:  Trump Tower, by witchblue sf roberti / Wikimedia Commons]

In a lawsuit filed the Monday after inauguration, the ethics group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) grabbed a few headlines by formally taking Trump to court. In its filing, CREW asked a federal court to rule that President Donald Trump’s business dealings violate the Constitutional clause forbidding officeholders to accept “emoluments or presents” from foreign governments. CREW has some famous law professors willing to lend their name to the case, including Larry Tribe of Harvard, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Zephyr Teachout.

Too bad it doesn’t have a place for them to stand.

That’s not a comment on the lawsuit’s ultimate merits, but on its lack of legal standing - the right to bring a lawsuit against the president. To show standing, it must prove that CREW itself has suffered some sort of direct, concrete, and particular injury not borne by the rest of us. To quote the New York Times analysis, CREW plans to argue that “it has suffered harm by having to divert resources from other work to monitor and respond to Mr. Trump’s activities.”

Whatever the politics, this is just bad legal judgment.

In a recent CNN interview Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, formerly a federal appeals judge, called that theory “just so silly that I can’t believe they put it on paper.” The point of standing law is to keep anyone who feels like it from coming into court to sue. And no one forced CREW to pay attention to this issue. It could have stayed home and watched Netflix.

[Click to continue reading.]