The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a man who sued a digital company for posting inaccurate information about him must do more to show he was actually harmed by the mistakes.
It was a narrow ruling and the third in a series of cases at the Supreme Court about class-action suits this term that did little — to the chagrin of business interests — to make such suits harder to file and win.
The case was of great interest to the business community, especially technology firms such as Facebook and Twitter that worry about lawsuits arising from faulty information posted online.
Spokeo.com allows a user to type in someone’s name and get a report. Robins said the facts about him were all wrong.
"His profile, he asserts, states that he is married, has children, is in his 50's, has a job, is relatively affluent, and holds a graduate degree," Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in the court's opinion. "According to Robins' complaint, all of this information is incorrect."
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970, which Alito pointed out was written before the advent of the Internet, requires credit-reporting agencies to adopt “reasonable procedures” to protect against inaccuracies and says victims can collect from $100 to $1,000 for each violation.
Robins filed a suit on behalf of himself and others, and said all he had to show was that what was written about him was inaccurate.
A district judge threw out his case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reinstated it, and the Supreme Court’s decision Monday remands the case back to the appeals court for more work.
Alito said that Robins must show that he has suffered a “concrete” injury before courts can find that he has the legal standing to pursue his case.
In passing FCRA, Alito wrote, Congress “plainly sought to curb the dissemination of false information by adopting procedures designed to decrease that risk.”
On the other hand, Robins cannot satisfy the Constitution’s definition of who may bring a lawsuit “by alleging a bare procedural violation,” Alito wrote. “A violation of one of the FCRA’s procedural requirements may result in no harm.”
For instance, Alito said, suppose the incorrect information supplied was a Zip code. “It is difficult to imagine how the dissemination of an incorrect zip code, without more, could work any concrete harm,” Alito wrote.
At oral argument in Spokeo v. Robins, the case seemed to divide the court along ideological lines. But liberal Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the court's conservatives in sending the case back.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have allowed Robins’s lawsuit to proceed.
Robins already has shown the violation could cost him, Ginsburg wrote.
“Robins complains of misinformation about his education, family situation, and economic status, inaccurate representations that could affect his fortune in the job market,” she wrote.
Cases about class-action suits often provoke disagreements between conservative justices, who worry about the unwarranted costs to businesses, and liberal justices, who say the court is shutting down consumer access to justice.
The court this term did not change the law much, despite the urging of business groups.
In a 6-to-2 ruling in a case called Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, the court rejected Tyson's contention that the more than 3,300 workers at a meatpacking plant should not have been able to use statistical averages to prove that they were not paid what they were due.
Earlier, the court had ruled in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez that a company cannot legally thwart a potential class-action suit simply by offering the lead plaintiff all that the plaintiff has sought. Had this ruling gone the other way, mounting such lawsuits would have become harder, because a defendant could moot a proceeding by removing the plaintiffs one at a time.
