It is no overstatement to say the class-action bar awaited the Supreme Court’s decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 141 S. Ct. 2190 (2021), with bated breath. When the 5–4 decision came down in June, it clarified the law of Article III standing in important respects, while leaving other important issues unresolved. The Court’s core ruling—that a Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) plaintiff asserting defamation-like claims lacks standing unless the defendant published inaccurate information about her to a third party—is clear enough, but did not break much new legal ground (most circuits, after all, had already held that plaintiffs asserting these types of claims had to prove publication to prevail). Perhaps more importantly, the Court also held that a mere risk of future harm—without more—does not confer Article III standing to sue for money damages, at least absent evidence that the risk materialized (or that the plaintiffs suffered a separate injury because of their exposure to the risk). But questions remain about how broadly or narrowly lower courts will read this part of Ramirez and what types of risk-related injuries they will deem sufficient to confer standing. And 2022 promises to be an interesting year as courts will be forced to wrestle with how to apply Ramirez outside the FCRA context.

The en banc Eleventh Circuit is slated to do just that later this year. The full court will consider Ramirez’s application to a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) case titled Hunstein v. Preferred Collection and Management Services, Inc. Applying Ramirez, the now-vacated panel opinion concluded that a plaintiff had standing to bring an FDCPA claim based on a debt collector’s disclosure of private, debt-related information to one of its mailing vendors. The specific issue presented in Hunstein—whether a debt collector’s disclosure of private information to one of its mailing vendors confers standing to sue under FDCPA provisions prohibiting certain third-party disclosures—is fairly narrow. The bigger question, though, is whether the en banc court will accept the panel’s test for determining whether an asserted statutory injury bears a “close relationship” to a harm redressable by a common-law tort claim, and thus constitutes a concrete injury-in-fact under Ramirez. The panel had held that to satisfy the “close relationship” standard, a plaintiff need “only show that his alleged injury is similar in kind to the harm addressed by a common-law cause of action, not that it is similar in degree.” After articulating that test, the panel held that Hunstein had standing, reasoning that he had alleged “a harm similar in kind to the common law tort of public disclosure of private facts” based on the alleged unlawful disclosure of his private debt information to a third-party mail vendor. How much of the panel’s reasoning survives en banc review remains to be seen. We will report on the en banc Hunstein decision when it is issued.