Re-Thinking Standing Doctrine for the Common Good
Commentary
By Joshua Sohn*
INTRODUCTION
It is common for public-interest lawsuits to fail on standing grounds—i.e., for courts to rule that plaintiffs did not suffer a personal injury and thus lack constitutional standing to bring suit. Standing doctrine has bedeviled public-interest litigants on the right and the left. Last year, for example, the Alliance Defending Freedom’s lawsuit against the FDA’s approval of medication abortion failed when the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing.[1] Fast forward a year, and progressive groups have seen their own public-interest lawsuits barred on standing grounds.[2]
But these court decisions are built on a foundation of sand. In fact, standing doctrine has no support in the text of the Constitution, nor in the history around the Constitution’s drafting. Moreover, dismissing public-interest lawsuits based on this faulty doctrine has real social costs. In an age of individualism and social decay, there’s something noble and important about lawsuits brought not for personal gain but to vindicate “the common good.” Thus, the law should welcome public-interest litigation by both the right and the left. It should not close the courthouse doors based on a doctrine that has no valid basis in the Constitution.
While eliminating or relaxing standing doctrine may seem like a quixotic quest, it may be less far-fetched than it seems. The last few years have seen the rise of “common-good constitutionalism”—a school of thought that re-examines constitutional principles with an eye towards promoting the common good.[3] Re-examining standing doctrine could and should be part of the common-good constitutional project. Moreover, social conservatives (who overlap with common-good constitutionalists) may have the most to gain from relaxing standing doctrine, as discussed below.
I. An Overview of Standing Doctrine
As articulated by the Supreme Court, standing doctrine states that a plaintiff cannot bring suit in Federal court unless the plaintiff can show an “injury-in-fact” that was caused by the defendant’s action and can be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.[4] This requires the plaintiff to show a concrete, particularized injury to him or herself.[5] As Justice Kavanaugh wrote in the recent medication abortion case, standing doctrine “requires a plaintiff to first answer a basic question: ‘What’s it to you?’ 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.”[6]
Standing doctrine is supposedly required by Article III of the Constitution, which limits Federal judicial power to “cases” and “controversies.”[7] Under current standing doctrine, there is no “case” or “controversy” if the plaintiff cannot show the standing requirements of injury-in-fact, causation, and redressability.[8] As Justice Scalia wrote in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife,[9] “the core component of standing is an essential and unchanging part of the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III.”[10]
II. Standing Doctrine Has No Basis in the Constitutional Text or History
But are the rigid requirements of injury-in-fact, causation, and redressability actually part of Article III? Is it really true that there is no “case” or “controversy” unless these requirements are met? All the available evidence points to no.
First, dictionaries from around the time of the Constitution’s drafting do not seem to impose these requirements. For example, one 18th-century dictionary defined “controversy” as simply “a dispute,” which tracks the modern definition of the word.[11] And as the Supreme Court held in one early opinion, the word “case” is synonymous with “controversy.”[12] From a semantic dictionary perspective, nothing in the words “case” or “controversy” seems to require injury-in-fact on the plaintiff’s part. Nor does the history of the Constitution’s drafting support smuggling an injury-in-fact requirement into the words “case” or “controversy.” As several scholars have noted, the Framers gave virtually no indication of what they intended “case” and “controversy” to mean,[13] so there is no reason to think they meant to deviate from the plain and ordinary meaning of these words.
Even more importantly, Founding-era courts were authorized to hear lawsuits where the plaintiff had not suffered any personal injury. For example, the first Congress enacted several “informer statutes” that allowed any informer-plaintiff to bring suit to enforce general public rights and interests, even if the informer-plaintiff had not suffered any personal injury.[14] Such statutes authorized lawsuits by informer-plaintiffs who discovered illegal activities like liquor smuggling, carriage of unlicensed seamen, or unauthorized trade with Indian tribes.[15] As these examples show, public-interest litigation is not a modern invention. It has been part of our legal system from the beginning, with no requirement that the public-interest plaintiffs suffered a personal injury-in-fact. The Supreme Court itself acknowledged in a 1905 case that “[s]tatutes providing for actions by a common informer, who himself had no interest whatever in the controversy other than that given by statute, have been in existence for hundreds of years in England, and in this country ever since the foundation of our government.”[16]
While “standing-less” public-interest suits have been part of our legal system from the beginning, standing doctrine itself has not. Despite the Supreme Court’s insistence that standing doctrine is an integral part of the Constitution, it is remarkable how recent the doctrine actually is. Courts and scholars dispute precisely when standing was born as a constitutional limitation, but they generally agree that it was well after the turn of the 20th century. One scholar pegged the genesis of constitutional standing doctrine to 1922,[17] another claimed the genesis date as 1924,[18] while a third put the date at 1944.[19] As one Federal district court summarized in 1997: “The [Supreme] Court’s modern conception of standing, as an Article III requirement, did not come into being until relatively recently.”[20]
This should give any reader doubts as to whether standing doctrine is really part of Article III of the Constitution. It should give particularly grave doubts to conservatives, who scorn the idea of a “living Constitution” that changes over the years.[21] Can it really be true that standing doctrine is an integral part of Article III but that courts overlooked this fact for the first 150 years of the nation’s existence?
Notably, the modern Supreme Court does not even try to anchor standing doctrine in the textual meaning of Article III, or the history of its drafting, or founding-era jurisprudence. Instead, the Supreme Court repeatedly justifies standing doctrine by cataloguing the doctrine’s supposed beneficial effects. For example, the Supreme Court has stated that standing doctrine improves judicial decision-making,[22] conserves judicial resources,[23] and reduces clashes between the Federal judicial and executive branches.[24] The pithiest response to these justifications is “so what?” One could invent any number of judicial doctrines that have positive effects, but that does not mean such doctrines are part of the Constitution.
In any event, it is not clear that standing doctrine even has the salutary effects that the Supreme Court ascribes to it. For example, while the quality of judicial decision-making depends in part on the quality of the lawyers who are arguing before the court, it does not depend on whether the plaintiff has suffered injury-in-fact. A public-interest plaintiff seeking to vindicate the common good can prosecute its case as effectively as a self-interested plaintiff suing over lost money or other personal injuries, and there is no reason why the quality of judicial decision-making will be better in the latter versus the former situation. Indeed, to the extent the quality of judicial decision-making depends on the quality of the arguing lawyers, it is worth noting that many public-interest groups have truly exceptional rosters of smart and passionate lawyers.[25]
As for conserving judicial resources, it is obviously true that every case dismissed on standing grounds is a case that will no longer need to be litigated. In that narrow sense, standing doctrine may help conserve judicial resources. But on the flip side, challenging a case on standing grounds will require party briefing and will often require discovery and/or judicial factfinding to determine whether the plaintiff actually has standing.[26] This is true in cases where the plaintiff ends up clearing the standing hurdle and cases where the plaintiff falls short—under either outcome, the standing issue still needs to be litigated. When one factors in these litigation costs, it is doubtful whether standing doctrine saves many, if any, judicial resources.
As for reducing clashes between the judicial and executive branches, it is true that invoking standing doctrine to dismiss suits brought against the executive branch will reduce the likelihood of injunctions against the executive branch. So in that sense, standing doctrine probably does reduce the number of times where the Federal judiciary may have cause to enjoin the executive. But this is an incredibly blunt instrument: imposing standing requirements in every case just to reduce the number of potential court judgments against the executive. If one is concerned with reducing conflicts between the judicial and executive branches, there are far more precise tools that can and should be applied. For example, without wading too deeply into the current debate over “nationwide injunctions” against the executive branch, there is a strong argument that injunctions should be no broader than necessary to give relief to the named plaintiff, as the Supreme Court held last term.[27] Refining the criteria for injunctions is an appropriate way to reduce conflicts between the judicial and executive branches. Dismissing cases on anti-textual, anti-historical standing grounds is not.
There is also a fundamental perversity to dismissing cases on standing grounds in order to reduce conflicts between the judicial and executive branches. The perversity is this: because the Supreme Court characterizes standing doctrine as a constitutional limitation that is non-waivable by Congress, it has dismissed cases on standing grounds even when Congress has passed broad citizen-suit provisions clearly indicating that it wants to broadly open the courthouse doors. In Lujan, for example, the statute at issue (the Endangered Species Act) had a broad citizen-suit provision stating that “any person may commence a civil suit on his own behalf [] to enjoin any person, including the United States and any other governmental instrumentality or agency ... who is alleged to be in violation of any provision of this chapter.”[28] But the Supreme Court held that this was not enough to confer standing on citizen-plaintiffs concerned about threats to wildlife.[29] It brushed aside the fact that Congress wanted to authorize suits by citizen-plaintiffs, stating that
Whether the courts were to act on their own, or at the invitation of Congress, in ignoring the concrete injury requirement described in our cases, they would be discarding a principle fundamental to the separate and distinct constitutional role of the Third Branch . . . It would enable the courts, with the permission of Congress, to assume a position of authority over the governmental acts of another and co-equal department and to become virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of Executive action.[30]
In other words, the Lujan Court justified standing doctrine based on its desire to reduce clashes between the judicial and executive branches, but it was able to reach its result only by flouting the will of Congress and thus creating a direct clash between the judicial and legislative branches. Needless to say, this does not make much sense. Creating a conflict with one of the political branches in order to dodge a conflict with the other is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Yet another flaw with standing doctrine is that it focuses on “injury-in-fact” even though there is no objective way to define “injury-in-fact.” Professor (now Judge) William Fletcher made this point decades ago in a brilliant law review article.[31] As Professor Fletcher wrote, imagine a person who is deeply distressed about cuts to government welfare, though he is not on welfare himself.[32] His distress causes him to lose sleep and to donate extra money on charity for the needy.[33] Most (if not all) judges would say that such person does not have standing to bring a lawsuit challenging government welfare cuts because he did not suffer an injury-in-fact, even though the welfare cuts caused him to lose sleep and spend money.[34] But now consider a different hypothetical where a homeowner is aggravated by a neighbor’s barking dog.[35] The barking dog causes him to lose sleep and to spend money on sound-proof windows to muffle the din.[36] Most (if not all) judges would say that the homeowner does have standing to bring a nuisance lawsuit because his lost sleep and out-of-pocket expenses do qualify as an injury-in-fact.[37] You get the point. The injuries in the two hypotheticals are exactly the same.
III. Reconsidering Standing Doctrine for the Common Good
Not only is standing doctrine unmoored from the Constitution and impossible to apply in an objective way, but society is harmed when courts use standing doctrine to strangle public-interest litigation. First, dismissing an otherwise-meritorious public-interest suit on standing grounds necessarily means that illegal conduct will continue when it could have been stopped. By contrast, there’s relatively little cost to allowing non-meritorious public-interest suits to overcome standing hurdles, because the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure offer numerous opportunities for judges to swiftly dismiss weak cases on the merits.[38] In other words, we don’t need standing doctrine to weed out weak cases, and there’s a real social cost when standing doctrine is deployed to kill strong cases.
Second, in an age of rising individualism and fraying communal ties,[39] we shouldn’t artificially impede public-interest litigation that seeks to advance the common good. We need more public-spiritedness, not less. In the medication abortion case, Justice Kavanaugh asked “what’s it to you?”,[40] implying that this is a worthy question for courts to ask. But our society already has too many people asking “what’s in it for me?” We need more public-spirited individuals who seek to advance the common good even when there’s “nothing in it for them.”
Of course, not every public-interest litigant will have the same conception of the common good. A conservative group like Alliance Defending Freedom will champion different issues than a left-leaning group like the American Civil Liberties Union, and there are situations where public-interest groups may square off against each other.[41] This is both inevitable and healthy in a pluralistic democracy. The point here is that our legal system should give public-interest litigants the chance to advocate in court for their own conception of the common good. It should not hobble public-interest litigation through a standing doctrine that has no valid basis in the Constitution.
Moreover, this is an opportune moment to reconsider standing doctrine for the common good because we are seeing the rise of common-good constitutionalism, particularly on the right. In the words of its founder, the Catholic legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, common-good constitutionalism “take[s] as its starting point substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the Constitution.”[42] This school of thought has made significant inroads in the conservative legal academy[43] and is linked with socially-conservative thinkers like Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen,[44] author Sohrab Ahmari,[45] and even Vice-President J.D. Vance.[46] Vance may be picking Supreme Court nominees one day—either in the current Administration or his own future Administration—and at least one recent essay argued that common-good constitutionalism should be the desired judicial philosophy for future Supreme Court nominees.[47] To the extent common-good constitutionalism is coming into vogue, re-thinking standing doctrine for the common good would promote common-good constitutional principles.
Finally, social conservatives in particular should be willing to re-think standing doctrine for the common good because they have a lot to lose when standing doctrine blocks public-interest litigation. Last year’s abortion medication case was one obvious example, and it probably won’t be the last. Pro-life litigation is particularly vulnerable to standing challenges, given the potential difficulties in finding willing plaintiffs who have suffered “injury-in-fact” from permissive abortion laws.[48] But even beyond abortion, social conservatives are rightly concerned with the rise of dubious pastimes (often digital pastimes) that can enervate society even though it may be hard to identify specific individuals who suffered “injury-in-fact.” Think of addictive social media,[49] or online porn,[50] or mobile sports gambling,[51] or gamified day-trading apps that constitute gambling in all but name.[52] Some of these digital opiates may be susceptible to court challenges on the merits, while others might not be. But to the extent conservative groups do bring court challenges against these sorts of digital opiates, they should be allowed to make their case on the merits without some future Justice Kavanaugh asking, “What’s it to you?”
Footnotes
* J.D., Harvard Law School, 2006; A.B., Stanford University, 2003. Thanks to the staff of the Loyola Law Review for their comments and suggestions.
[1] See Amy Howe, Supreme Court preserves access to abortion pill, SCOTUSblog (June 13, 2024), https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-preserves-access-to-abortion-pill/.
[2] See Justin Jouvenal and Salvador Rizzo, Supreme Court halts order to rehire probationary workers fired by Trump, Washington Post (April 8, 2025).
[3] See generally Debra Cassens Weiss, Forget Originalism; some conservatives back ‘common-good constitutionalism,’ its embrace of strong rule, ABA Journal (Feb. 19, 2025), https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/forget-originalism-some-conservatives-back-common-good-constitutionalism-and-its-embrace-of-strong-rule#google_vignette.
[4] See, e.g., United States v. Texas, 599 U.S. 670, 676 (2023) (“To establish standing, a plaintiff must show an injury in fact caused by the defendant and redressable by a court order.”).
[5] See, e.g., Clapper v. Amnesty Int'l USA, 568 U.S. 398, 409 (2013) (“To establish Article III standing, an injury must be ‘concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the challenged action; and redressable by a favorable ruling.’”) (citation omitted).
[6] FDA. v. All. for Hippocratic Med., 602 U.S. 367, 379 (2024) (internal citation omitted).
[7] U.S. Const., art. III; see also note 5, supra (grounding standing doctrine in Article III).
[8] Texas, 599 U.S. at 675-76.
[9] Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992).
[10] Id. at 560.
[11] See Martin H. Redish & Andrianna D. Kastanek, Settlement Class Actions, the Case-or-Controversy Requirement, and the Nature of the Adjudicatory Process, 73 U. Chi. L. Rev. 545, 564 (2006) (citing Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (Neill 16th Ed. 1755)).
[12] See Cohens v. Virginia., 19 U.S. 264, 378 (1821) (stating that “cases” in Article III are defined with reference to subject-matter while “controversies” are defined with reference to the parties; implying there is no other meaningful difference between the two terms).
[13] See, e.g., Gene R. Nichol, Jr., Justice Scalia, Standing, and Public Law Litigation, 42 Duke L. J. 1141, 1150 (1993) (“The constitutional barrier to standing . . . is Article III's ‘case or controversy’ requirement. As has been much noted, the Framers gave almost no indication of what the phrase meant.”); accord Susan Bandes, The Idea of a Case, 42 Stan. L. Rev. 227, 230-31 (1990); F. Andrew Hessick, Standing, Injury in Fact, and Private Rights, 93 Cornell L. Rev. 275, 278 (2008).
[14] See Vt. Agency of Nat. Res. v. United States ex rel. Stevens, 529 U.S. 765, 776-77 n.6 (2000) (cataloguing these statutes).
[15] Id.
[16] Marvin v. Trout, 199 U.S. 212, 225 (1905).
[17] Steven L. Winter, The Metaphor of Standing and the Problem of Self-Governance, 40 Stan. L. Rev. 1371, 1375-76 (1988) (“The notion that standing is a bedrock requirement of constitutional law has a surprisingly short history. Frothingham v. Mellon [of 1923], which rejected a taxpayer suit to enjoin a federal spending program, is generally thought of as the first modern standing case. In fact, it is not. Fairchild v. Hughes, decided a year before Frothingham and authored by Justice Brandeis, was the first case to reject a taxpayer suit because the ‘plaintiff's alleged interest in the question submitted is not such as to afford a basis for this proceeding.’”).
[18] Louis L. Jaffe, Standing to Secure Judicial Review: Private Actions, 75 Harv. L. Rev. 255, 262 (1961) (“It was only with the decision in The Chicago Junction Case [of 1924] that the criterion of standing was brought into focus.”).
[19] Cass R. Sunstein, What's Standing After Lujan? Of Citizen Suits, "Injuries," and Article III, 91 Mich. L. Rev. 163, 169 (1992) (“The first reference to ‘standing’ as an Article III limitation can be found in Stark v. Wickard, decided in 1944.”).
[20] United States ex rel. Riley v. St. Luke's Episcopal Hosp., 982 F. Supp. 1261, 1267 (S.D. Tex. 1997); see also Edward A. Hartnett, The Standing of the United States: How Criminal Prosecutions Show That Standing Doctrine Is Looking for Answers in All the Wrong Places, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 2239, 2241 (1999) (“Numerous scholars have demonstrated that insistence on a personal injury in fact as a requirement of Article III is a relatively recent invention”).
[21] See, e.g., Lee Strang, Originalism and Conservatism: An American Story, Heritage Foundation (Feb. 1, 2024), https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/originalism-and-conservatism-american-story (criticizing “living constitutionalism” from a standard conservative perspective).
[22] See, e.g., Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204 (1962) (stating that standing doctrine “assure[s] that concrete adverseness which sharpens the presentation of issues upon which the court so largely depends for illumination of difficult constitutional questions.”).
[23] See, e.g., Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Env. Servs., Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 170 (2000) (“[s]tanding doctrine functions to ensure, among other things, that the scarce resources of the federal courts are devoted to those disputes in which the parties have a concrete stake.”).
[24] See, e.g., Lujan, 504 U.S. at 577 (arguing that, without standing doctrine, “the [courts could] assume a position of authority over the governmental acts of another and co-equal department and become virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of Executive action.”) (internal citations and quotation marks omitted).
[25] For example, in the abortion medication case, the lawyers representing the Alliance Defending Freedom in district court included at least one former Supreme Court clerk and two former U.S. Circuit Court clerks. See Case No. 2:22-cv-223 (N.D. Tex.), docket sheet (available on PACER). Public-interest groups, particularly on the left, also have the ability to engage top national law firms who often assist their cases pro bono.
[26] See, e.g., HRPT Props. Tr. v. Lingle, 676 F. Supp. 2d 1036, 1041 (D. Haw. 2009) (“When standing is factually attacked in a Rule 12(b)(1) motion, the court may hear evidence before ruling on the issue. Few procedural limitations exist in a factual challenge to a complaint's jurisdictional allegations. The court may permit discovery before allowing the plaintiff to demonstrate the requisite jurisdictional facts.”) (internal citations omitted).
[27] Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. __ (2025).
[28] Lujan, 504 U.S. at 571-72 (quoting 16 U.S.C. § 1540(g) (ellipses in original)).
[29] See id. at 572-76.
[30] Id. at 576 (internal citations and quotation marks deleted).
[31] William A. Fletcher, The Structure of Standing, 98 Yale L.J. 221, 254 (1988).
[32] Id. at 232.
[33] Id.
[34] Id.
[35] Id.
[36] Id.
[37] Id.
[38] See Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6) (authorizing dismissal when a complaint fails to state a claim for relief); Fed. R. Civ. P 56 (authorizing summary judgment where there is no genuine dispute of material fact and a party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law).
[39] See, e.g., Derek Thompson, The Anti-Social Century, The Atlantic (Jan. 8, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/anti-social-century-technology-isolation/XXXXXX/.
[40] See fn. 6, supra.
[41] The abortion medication case, for example, had a number of public-interest groups on opposite sides of the dispute. See Case No. 23-235 (U.S. Supreme Court), docket sheet.
[42] Adrian Vermeule, Beyond Originalism, The Atlantic (March 31, 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/.
[43] See Mattathias Schwartz, The Radical Legal Theories that Could Fuel a Constitutional Crisis, New York Times (Feb. 15, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/constitution-crisis-trump-judges-legal.html (“Mr. Vermeule’s ‘common-good constitutionalism’ is gaining traction in some corners of the U.S. judiciary, particularly among judges — roughly one quarter of the bench — who were appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term.”).
[44] Id.; see also Amy Kapczynski, Reading the Post-Neoliberal Right, LPE (Jan. 11, 2023), https://lpeproject.org/blog/reading-the-post-neoliberal-right/ (“A few months ago, Deneen gave a talk to a packed room here at YLS, hosted by our Federalist Society, billed as a celebration of Vermeule’s common good constitutionalism.”).
[45] Kapczynski, supra note 44; see also Don Bryant, Sohrab Ahmari and Common Good Constitutionalism (April 25, 2020).
[46] See, e.g., Peter Smith and Michelle R. Smith, What is postliberalism? How a Catholic intellectual movement influenced J.D. Vance’s political views, PBS News (Sept. 4, 2024), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-postliberalism-how-a-catholic-intellectual-movement-influenced-jd-vances-political-views (linking Vance’s political philosophy to Deneen’s and Vermeule’s); Ian Ward, The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview, Politico (July 18, 2024), https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984 (linking Vance’s political philosophy to Deneen’s and Ahmari’s).
[47] Andrew Hayes and Benjamin Holbrook, Matey for SCOTUS, Commonplace (June 3, 2025), https://www.commonplace.org/p/matey-for-scotus (“In his first term, President Trump picked three justices who represent the best of the Federalist Society model for judges . . . Conservative lawyers, academics, and law students need a new kind of Justice, one who takes seriously the academic revival of natural law and the common good . . .”).
[48] Indeed, in last year’s abortion medication case, Justice Kavanaugh explained that “[u]nder Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue.” FDA, 602 U.S. at 374 (emphasis in original). It is easy to see how this logic could apply to any number of cases where pro-life groups seek to challenge permissive abortion laws.
[49] See, e.g., Nathan Yerby, Missouri Senator Proposes Law to Combat Social Media Addition, Addiction Center (May 28, 2025), https://www.addictioncenter.com/news/2019/08/senator-proposes-law-social-media-addiction/ (“On July 30, Senator Josh Hawley proposed the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act to limit features on social media platforms that may contribute to social media addiction. Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, claims that social media providers have ‘embraced a business model of addiction’ to design products which ‘capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away,’ leading to internet addictions like Facebook addiction, Snapchat addiction, Instagram addiction, and TikTok addiction among others.”).
[50] See, e.g., Brian J. Willoughby and Jason S. Carroll, Five Reasons Porn Is Bad for Your Mariage, Institute for Family Studies (April 23, 2025), https://ifstudies.org/blog/five-reasons-porn-is-bad-for-your-marriage.
[51] See, e.g., Jude Russo, It’s Not Too Late to Ban Online Sportsbook, Commonplace (Feb. 3, 2025), https://www.commonplace.org/p/its-not-too-late-to-ban-online-sportsbook (“Online sports betting is neither economically nor socially desirable. It doesn’t have to be tolerated.”).
[52] See, e.g., Gunjan Banerji, More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market, The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 20, 2024), https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-market-trading-apps-addiction-afecb07a?msockid=3df64b86c3a96a053f535f59c2c26be3 (“Gamblers Anonymous meetings are filling up with people hooked on trading and betting. Apps make it as easy as ordering takeout.”).
