Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Are we STANDING for this?

Lost the STOP GOOGLE! suit. Darn.

And, on a strange technicality. Turns out I did not have "standing" to sue.

In other words, it's my money (or part of it). It's state policy, and I live in the state. But you can't sue.

Note that this is NOT sovereign immunity, saying no one could sue the state. This is just that no one can sue the state. Get it? Neither do I...

(UPDATE: Anonyman shares this wisdom.... Think of standing like this: Your spouse wakes up and comes down stairs for coffee, she looks at you with an icy stare and says that in her dream you asked her to participate in a freaky three-way, and she's ticked at you because of her dream. You can now respond that since you were not a party to the dream, she does not have standing to be mad at you.

I'm sure it will work like a charm.


Oh, yeah. THAT will definitely work...)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Standing is a highly subjective test the courts use to dodge issues they don't want to deal with, often executive policy decisions. Many states and the feds have "tests" they employ, such as threat of immediate harm, ability of the courts to redress said harm, etc. But more often than not the P fails one aspect of the test. Besides, spring is coming and they need to protect golf time.

If only a LIbertarian would run for gov.

Unknown said...

Thus the problem with suing government: If you're assaulted, burglarized, or infringed upon in any way by a government employee and you wish to sue, you must appeal to the same institution that you were wronged by. On top of that, after the verdict is inevitably passed in favor of the judge's employer or colleague, they turn around with their hand out and say "your welcome for this service we provided you, here is our fee."

Dirty Davey said...

Is there any plaintiff left that COULD possibly file suit? For example, I am certain that SAS has at least some of its own data-center operations, and they do not seem to be beneficiaries of this particular tax break.

Could a suit from SAS more directly show that they were affected? They're paying taxes on the same sort of facility on which Google is getting an exemption, and any company wishing to DIY their data operations is inherently disadvantaged compared to outsourcing to a company with a tax-favored data center.

(Now the remedy for that suit might end up broadening rather than eliminating the tax break... but it would be much harder to argue against SAS having standing than to argue against standing for a taxpayer.)