Wasserman v. Franklin County

Sherran Wasserman agreed to sell land in Franklin County to Anthony Pham, but the sale depended on Pham getting a county permit to build chicken houses. The county board denied the permit, and Wasserman sued the county, eventually arguing that the denial violated Pham's equal protection rights because of his race. Because Pham himself was not suing, Wasserman relied on a federal legal idea called 'third-party standing,' which lets a plaintiff sue over someone else's rights under certain conditions. A trial court and the Court of Appeals of Georgia both used that federal test, though the Court of Appeals decided Wasserman failed it. The Supreme Court of Georgia used the case to ask whether that borrowed federal doctrine is even valid under Georgia law. Looking at common law history and long lines of Georgia decisions, the court held that Georgia's Constitution requires a plaintiff to assert her own legal rights to sue at all, so the federal third-party-standing theory cannot be used in Georgia courts. It sent the case back so lower courts can consider Wasserman's separate argument that Pham assigned her his rights.

A plaintiff cannot invoke the judicial power of Georgia courts by relying only on the federal doctrine of third-party standing, which allows suing based on another person's rights. Georgia's Constitution requires a plaintiff to assert a violation of her own legal rights, at minimum, to maintain any lawsuit.

The ruling closes off a legal shortcut that had let people sue in Georgia courts over harm to someone else's rights. Litigants, especially those challenging government actions on behalf of others, must now show their own legal rights are affected, which will reshape how such cases are argued and decided statewide.

Judgment vacated and case remanded with direction

1. The court explained that the Georgia Constitution's Judicial Power Paragraph, largely unchanged since 1798, must be interpreted using the common law backdrop in place when it was adopted, rather than by borrowing modern federal Article III standing rules.
2. Reviewing common law history, the court found that both private-rights cases (rights belonging to individuals) and public-rights cases (rights shared by the community) required a plaintiff to assert a violation of her own legal rights, not just real-world harm, under the old doctrine of 'damnum absque injuria' (damage without a legal injury).
3. The court traced over a century of its own decisions, from Hendrick v. Cook in 1848 through cases just before the 1983 Constitution, showing a consistent rule that plaintiffs could not sue to vindicate the rights of nonparties, only their own.
4. Because federal 'third-party standing' lets a plaintiff sue based solely on someone else's rights once she shows an injury in fact, close relationship, and a hindrance to the third party, the court found this doctrine incompatible with Georgia's bedrock rule that a plaintiff must assert her own rights.
5. Applying the stare decisis analysis, which asks whether it is more harmful to leave a wrong precedent in place than to correct it, the court found the 2007 decision adopting third-party standing was unreasoned, poorly fit with existing Georgia law, and not relied upon enough to justify keeping it, so it overruled that precedent.
6. The court also rejected Wasserman's argument that federal supremacy law barred applying Georgia's standing rule to her federal claim, explaining that Georgia's standing requirement is a neutral jurisdictional rule that applies evenhandedly to state and federal claims alike.

• standing to sue
• third-party standing
• conditional use permit
• equal protection claim
• stare decisis