Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/17

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Cite as: 600 U. S. ____ (2023)
9

Opinion of the Court

whether an organization’s members have standing. We nevertheless concluded that the Commission had standing because the apple growers and dealers it represented were effectively members of the Commission. Id., at 344. The growers and dealers “alone elect[ed] the members of the Commission,” “alone … serve[d] on the Commission,” and “alone finance[d] its activities”—they possessed, in other words, “all of the indicia of membership.” Ibid. The Commission was therefore a genuine membership organization in substance, if not in form. And it was “clearly” entitled to rely on the doctrine of organizational standing under the three-part test recounted above. Id., at 343.

The indicia of membership analysis employed in Hunt has no applicability in these cases. Here, SFFA is indisputably a voluntary membership organization with identifiable members—it is not, as in Hunt, a state agency that concededly has no members. See 2018 DC Opinion 241–242. As the First Circuit in the Harvard litigation observed, at the time SFFA filed suit, it was “a validly incorporated 501(c)(3) nonprofit with forty-seven members who joined voluntarily to support its mission.” 980 F. 3d, at 184. Meanwhile in the UNC litigation, SFFA represented four members in particular—high school graduates who were denied admission to UNC. See 2018 DC Opinion 234. Those members filed declarations with the District Court stating “that they have voluntarily joined SFFA; they support its mission; they receive updates about the status of the case from SFFA’s President; and they have had the opportunity to have input and direction on SFFA’s case.” Id., at 234–235 (internal quotation marks omitted). Where, as here, an organization has identified members and represents them in good faith, our cases do not require further scrutiny into how the organization operates. Because SFFA complies with the standing requirements demanded of organizational plaintiffs in Hunt, its obligations under Article III are satisfied.