Ana Tagvoryan, Deborah A. Skakel, Edward W. Chang, Scott E. Wortman, Jeffrey N. Rosenthal, Chenxi Jiao, and Harrison M. Brown

On June 25, 2021, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, No. 20-297, 2021 WL 2599472 (U.S. June 25, 2021) (“TransUnion”), providing much needed clarity regarding the type of “concrete” harm necessary to establish a plaintiff’s standing under Article III of the United States Constitution.

In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Kavanaugh, the Court expounded on its ruling in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330 (2016), using several examples to illustrate how to measure the harm plaintiffs allege from a statutory violation. As Justice Kavanaugh succinctly stated: “No concrete harm, no standing.”

In TransUnion, the lower court certified a class of 8,124 absent class members who purportedly suffered injury under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) because TransUnion had placed an alert on their credit report indicating that the consumer’s name was a “potential match” to a name on the list maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) of terrorists, drug traffickers, and other serious criminals.

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