Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization

Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization, 426 U.S. 26 (1976), was a United States Supreme Court case decided in 1976. In a majority opinion authored by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., the Court held that the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization and other respondents did not have Article III standing to challenge a specific revenue ruling issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The revenue ruling had extended favorable treatment to hospitals that limited the availability of non-emergency treatment to indigent patients.

Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 10, 1975 Decided June 1, 1976
Full case name	William E. Simon, Secretary of the Treasury, et al., Petitioners, v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization et al.
Citations	426 U.S. 26 (more) 96 S.Ct. 1917, 48 L.Ed.2d 450
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization v. Simon, 506 F.2d 1278 (D.C. Cir. 1974)
Holding
The District Court should have granted petitioners' motion to dismiss because respondents failed to establish their standing to bring this suit.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Thurgood Marshall Harry Blackmun · Lewis F. Powell Jr. William Rehnquist · John P. Stevens
Case opinions
Majority	Powell, joined by Burger, Stewart, White, Blackmun, Rehnquist
Concurrence	Stewart
Concurrence	Brennan (in judgment), joined by Marshall
Stevens took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Multiple indigent individuals and organizations representing those individuals, including the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization, filed a lawsuit challenging the revenue ruling on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act and was inconsistent with the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. The organizations and individuals had claimed to have standing because the policy encouraged hospitals to deny care to indigent patients, but the Supreme Court dismissed this idea as "purely speculative" and insufficient to establish standing.

Gene Nichol argued in a 1980 article that Eastern Kentucky, along with the Court's decision in Warth v. Seldin (1975), reflected "both a preoccupation with specific pleading and a potential hostility toward inferences of indirect causation of injury". Nichol also wrote that Eastern Kentucky's requirement for plaintiffs "to plead with specificity the effects of a tax ruling on particular hospitals in order to withstand a motion to dismiss, effectively sounds a death knell to such actions."

External links

• Text of Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization is available from: Cornell Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)