The Supreme Court has denied a request for a second hearing in Spokeo v. Robins, after the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of a plaintiff alleging that he suffered concrete harm when inaccurate information about himself was published on one of Spokeo’s websites.
The first time Spokeo was argued before the Supreme Court in 2016 led to a monumental decision for the ARM industry, when the Supreme Court ruled that an individual had to suffer a “concrete” injury in order to file a lawsuit in federal court. That ruling remanded the Spokeo case back to the Ninth Circuit, to determine whether the plaintiff, Thomas Robins, suffered a concrete injury when the inaccurate information was posted by Spokeo. The Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the plaintiff, and that ruling was subsequently appealed by Spokeo to the Supreme Court, which then denied the request for a second hearing in the case.
Many collection agencies have used the Spokeo defense when arguing against lawsuits alleging violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, saying that the plaintiffs suffered no concrete injury if there was a technical violation in a collection letter, for example. But more and more District Courts were beginning to poke holes in the Spokeo defense, which is one of the reasons why the company petitioned the Supreme Court for a second hearing.
A copy of Spokeo’s petition for a second hearing can be accessed here.
Spokeo argued that “confusion” among “scores of lower courts” have used different “approaches in determining whether an asserted “intangible harm” allegedly caused by a statutory violation is sufficient to satisfy Article III’s injury-in-fact requirement.”
