The web of rulings spiraling out of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals’s decision in Hunstein v. Preferred Collection & Management Services is beginning to be woven, this time in a Fair Credit Reporting Act case. But in this case a District Court judge determined the plaintiff did not have standing to accuse a potential employer of violating the FCRA by procuring a credit report on the members of the class without first providing a lawful disclosure and granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
A copy of the ruling in the case of James v. Circle K Stores can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff accused the defendant of violating the FCRA because he mistakenly thought the “disclosure and authorization” he provided to the defendant when applying for a job authorized the defendant to obtain all of his personal information, including his medical history. The defendant did obtain the plaintiff’s criminal history and Social Security number, but nothing else. While there was contradictory evidence about the disclosures, Judge Mark Walker of the District Court for the Northern District of Florida used Hunstein and another case to determine the plaintiff lacked standing to bring his suit in the first place.
Similar to Hunstein, Judge Walker was tasked with determining whether the plaintiff could show Article III standing through a “statutory violation” that gave rise “to an intangible, but-nonetheless-concrete injury.” Ultimately, using a combination of Hunstein and Muransky v. Godiva Chocolatier, Judge Walker determined that the harms in this case needed to be more than abstract. What harm was produced by the actual statutory violation? In this case, Judge Walker ruled, the “statutory violation at issue here resulted in the ‘harm’ of Defendant obtaining information about Plaintiff that Plaintiff did not object to Defendant procuring,” which wasn’t really a harm at all. “Because the harm of this statutory violation is not comparable to the harm of intrusion upon seclusion, this analysis of history and harm supports the conclusion that Plaintiff does not demonstrate injury in fact and lacks Article III standing,” Judge Walker ruled.
A judge in Illinois last week may have been the first to mention Hunstein, when he cited the case
