Standing is the mechanism by which courts decide whether a claim may be heard. It is not a guarantee of protection, and it is not a recognition of status. Standing operates after harm has been alleged and only within the narrow conditions that permit judicial review.
This timing matters.
Standing doctrine presupposes that harm has already occurred or is imminent in a form the court recognizes as justiciable. It does not govern whether consequence may be assigned in the first place. It governs only whether a person may later contest what has already happened.
Courts have been explicit about this role. Standing exists to constrain judicial power, not to ensure that every injury is addressed. It functions as a gate, not a remedy. Where standing is absent, courts do not correct the harm; they abstain from acting at all.
Modern standing doctrine reflects this limitation clearly. In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the Supreme Court acknowledged the existence of environmental harm but held that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the injury was insufficiently concrete and particularized. The Court did not deny that harm could occur. It denied that the harm could be heard.
That pattern recurs. In Clapper v. Amnesty International USA (2013), the Court rejected standing claims based on credible allegations of surveillance, holding that anticipated harm was too speculative, even where plaintiffs altered their behavior to avoid it. In Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins (2016), the Court reaffirmed that statutory violations alone do not establish standing absent concrete injury. In TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez (2021), the Court held that thousands of individuals whose inaccurate credit files were disseminated lacked standing for damages because the harm did not meet judicial thresholds in each case.
These decisions are often described as limiting access to court. That description understates the structural issue. What these cases demonstrate is that standing operates downstream of consequence and only recognizes harm that fits judicial categories designed for discrete, episodic injury.
Contemporary systems do not operate in that manner.
Informational harm, reputational damage, administrative exclusion, risk scoring, eligibility denial, and automated decision-making assign consequence continuously. They do not wait for a discrete moment of injury. They do not announce themselves as legally cognizable events. They propagate incrementally, often invisibly, across systems that interact but do not share accountability.
By the time such harm becomes legible to a court, continuity may already be broken. Access has been withdrawn. Opportunities have been lost. Records have hardened. Standing arrives, if it arrives at all, after the structural moment has passed.
This is not a failure of courts. Courts are applying standing doctrine as designed. Standing was never intended to govern upstream consequence assignment. It exists to prevent courts from acting where jurisdiction or justiciability is absent. It cannot prevent harm from occurring. It can only respond to harm after it has been framed in judicially acceptable terms.
The result is a structural gap.
Humans bear consequence before they are recognized as subjects capable of contesting it. Standing offers no protection at the point where obligation, exclusion, or loss is imposed. It offers only the possibility of later review, contingent on thresholds many modern harms cannot meet.
In this sense, standing functions as an acknowledgment after the fact rather than as a condition of legitimacy before action. It presumes a world in which harm is discrete, attributable, and reversible. That presumption no longer holds.
This article does not argue that standing doctrine is wrong, outdated, or unjust. It records that standing is temporally misaligned with the way contemporary systems assign consequence. Standing arrives after harm. In many cases, it arrives too late to restore symmetry or continuity.
Standing can regulate access to courts. It cannot regulate the assignment of consequence in advance. Where recognition occurs only after harm, legitimacy is already compromised.
The question is not whether standing should be expanded. The question is what must exist before standing, if consequence is to be assigned without structural asymmetry.