ADAM POTTER; MOXIE HC LLC, Appellants v. COZEN & O‘CONNOR; ANNE BLUME, Esquire; ANNE M. MADONIA, Esquire
No. 21-2258
United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
August 24, 2022
JORDAN, KRAUSE, and PORTER, Circuit Judges
PRECEDENTIAL. Submitted Under Third Circuit LAR 34.1(a) March 14, 2022.
Opinions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
8-24-2022
Adam Potter v. Cozen & O\‘Connor
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“Adam Potter v. Cozen & O\‘Connor” (2022). 2022 Decisions. 631. https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/thirdcircuit_2022/631
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Haines & Associates
1339 Chestnut Street
The Widener Building, 5th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Attorney for Adam Potter and Moxie HC LLC
Cozen & O’Connor
1650 Market Street
One Liberty Place, Suite 2800
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Attorney for Cozen & O’Connor, Anne Blume, Esquire, and Anne Madonia, Esquire
OPINION
KRAUSE, Circuit Judge.
A plaintiff who seeks to invoke the jurisdiction of the federal courts must meet the standing requirements of Article III of the United States Constitution. But courts have also attached the label of “standing doctrine” to various “equitable” or “prudential” limitations they have imposed on a plaintiff‘s ability to bring a claim, raising the question whether those so-called standing doctrines are also jurisdictional. This case involves the third-party standing doctrine, which as applied in the context of derivative harm to shareholders, has come to be called the “shareholder standing rule.” On the basis of that rule, the District Court dismissed Appellants’ claim under
I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND1
Appellees Cozen O‘Connor, Anne Blume, and Anne Madonia (collectively, the “Lawyers“) comprise the legal team
Once these conflicts came to light, Potter brought suit against the Lawyers, claiming breach of fiduciary duty and professional malpractice sounding in tort and contract. JA 44a-51a. Significantly, though, he chose to bring suit in the Shareholders’ names, even as he identified the harm as “the difference in the true value of the [LLCs] and the purchase price” that, under the APA, was to be paid to the LLCs themselves. JA 44a; see JA 58a, 63a (defining “Sellers” as the LLCs and specifying that payments would be made to “Sellers“).
Seizing on this discrepancy, the Lawyers moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim under
II. JURISDICTION AND STANDARD OF REVIEW
The District Court had jurisdiction under
In reviewing a district court‘s dismissal for lack of standing, we consider whether the complaint “contain[s] sufficient factual matter that would establish standing if accepted as true.” In re Horizon Healthcare Servs. Inc. Data Breach Litig., 846 F.3d 625, 633 (3d Cir. 2017) (quotation and internal quotation marks omitted). Our standard of review on that ruling is de novo, accepting the facts alleged in the complaint as true and construing the complaint in the light most favorable to the non-moving party. Id.; Graden v. Conexant Sys. Inc., 496 F.3d 291, 294 n.2 (3d Cir. 2007). In contrast, we review a district court‘s denial of leave to amend for abuse of discretion. In re Burlington Coat Factory Sec. Litig., 114 F.3d 1410, 1434 (3d Cir. 1997).
III. DISCUSSION
Neither party challenges the District Court‘s decision to analyze shareholder standing as an issue of subject matter jurisdiction under
Below, we first address the nature of the shareholder standing rule, concluding it is non-jurisdictional and did not warrant dismissal under
A. The Shareholder Standing Rule is Prudential and Non-Jurisdictional.
The District Court reasoned that because all of the harm the Shareholders attributed to the Lawyers’ alleged misconduct was inflicted directly on the LLCs and affected the Shareholders only to the extent of their derivative ownership interests, “the only injury-in-fact alleged . . . is an injury suffered by the [LLCs] themselves,” so the Shareholders lacked Article III standing. JA 25a–26a. The Court had in mind the third-party standing doctrine, which requires that “the plaintiff generally must assert his own legal rights and interests, and cannot rest his claim to relief on the legal rights or interests of third parties.” Franchise Tax Bd. of Cal. v. Alcan Aluminium Ltd., 493 U.S. 331, 336 (1990). In the context of harm to a corporation, this doctrine has given rise to the “so-called shareholder standing rule,” which is “a longstanding equitable restriction that generally prohibits shareholders from initiating actions to enforce the rights of the corporation unless the corporation‘s management has refused to pursue the same action for reasons other than good-faith business judgment.” Id. But in equating shareholder standing with Article III standing and dismissing under
1. Constitutional v. Prudential Standing
The distinction between the requirements of constitutional and prudential standing is significant. As the Supreme Court has explained, standing “consist[s] of two related components: the constitutional requirements of Article III and nonconstitutional prudential considerations.” Id. at 335; see also Miller v. Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp., 362 F.3d 209, 221 (3d Cir. 2004) (“[T]he question of standing is whether the litigant is entitled to have the court decide the merits of the dispute or of particular issues,” and answering that question “subsumes a blend of constitutional requirements and prudential considerations.” (quotation omitted)). To invoke the jurisdiction of a federal court, a plaintiff must meet the “irreducible constitutional minimum” of Article III standing by establishing three elements: that she has suffered an “injury in fact” which is “concrete and particularized” and “actual or imminent“; that the injury is “fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant“; and that it is likely “that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.” Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560–61 (1992) (alterations and quotations omitted).
But prudential standing requirements are not derived from Article III, Lexmark Int‘l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 572 U.S. 118, 125–26 (2014), and rather are “a set of judge-made rules forming an integral part of judicial self-government,” Joint Stock Soc‘y v. UDV N. Am., Inc., 266 F.3d 164, 179 (3d Cir. 2001) (internal quotation marks
Because “[b]randing a rule as going to a court‘s subject-matter jurisdiction alters the normal operation of our adversarial system,” Grp. Against Smog & Pollution, 810 F.3d at 122 (alteration in original) (quoting Henderson ex rel. Henderson v. Shinseki, 562 U.S. 428, 434 (2011)), a motion to dismiss for lack of subject jurisdiction pursuant to
2. The Third-Party Standing Doctrine
The distinction between constitutional and prudential standing can also be elusive, and the Courts of Appeals have not always spoken clearly about whether the third-party standing doctrine (including the shareholder standing rule) implicates Article III standing, and hence, the court‘s jurisdiction. Compare Korte v. Sebelius, 735 F.3d 654, 668 (7th Cir. 2013) (“Like other rules of third-party standing . . . the shareholder-standing rule is a prudential limitation and does not affect the court‘s authority to hear the case [because] [p]rudential-standing doctrine[s] [are] not jurisdictional in the sense that Article III standing is.” (quotation omitted)), Wilderness Soc‘y v. Kane County, 632 F.3d 1162, 1168 n.1 (10th Cir. 2011) (“[P]rudential standing is not a jurisdictional limitation and may be waived . . . .“), and Ensley v. Cody Res., Inc., 171 F.3d 315, 320 (5th Cir. 1999) (holding that shareholder standing rule does not implicate the court‘s jurisdiction and thus objections based on it could be waived), with Fair Elections Ohio v. Husted, 770 F.3d 456, 461 n.2 (6th Cir. 2014) (noting that “the limit on third-party standing” can be raised by the court sua sponte as a matter of its own jurisdiction), and Hillside Metro Assocs., LLC v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, Nat. Ass‘n, 747 F.3d 44, 49–50 & n.5 (2d Cir. 2014) (noting that the application of prudential standing doctrines implicated the court‘s subject matter jurisdiction).
We have not yet addressed this issue directly, although we have noted the divergence of views. See Lewis v. Alexander, 685 F.3d 325, 340 n.14 (3d Cir. 2012). We hold today that the shareholder standing rule is non-jurisdictional, implicating only a plaintiff‘s power to bring claims, not the Court‘s power to hear them. We reach this conclusion based on Supreme Court precedent, our precedent in other contexts,
Supreme Court Precedent. While the Supreme Court has not yet squarely addressed this question, we find its statements regarding the distinctions between Article III standing and prudential standing instructional. In Franchise Tax Board of California v. Alcan Aluminium Ltd., the Court noted that separate from Article III standing requirements are the various “prudential requirements of the standing doctrine,” including the third-party standing doctrine and its related application, the “so-called shareholder standing rule.” 493 U.S. at 336. It described the shareholder standing rule not as a jurisdictional limitation, but as an “equitable restriction,” and it reasoned that regardless of whether the shareholder respondents in that case could meet the requirements of the shareholder standing rule, they nonetheless “ha[d] Article III standing to challenge the taxes that their wholly owned subsidiaries are required to pay” because their ownership interest meant the subsidiaries’ financial injuries created “actual financial injur[ies]” to the shareholders. Id. But cf. United States v. Sineneng-Smith, 140 S. Ct. 1575, 1586–87 (2020) (Thomas, J., concurring) (acknowledging that “the modern Court has characterized the [third-party standing] rule as a prudential rather than jurisdictional matter,” and arguing that is inconsistent with “a historical understanding of Article III“).
On other occasions, too, the Court has held that, while defects in Article III jurisdiction can never be waived, even when parties fail to raise them, the same is not true of issues related to the third-party standing doctrine. Compare Va. House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, 139 S. Ct. 1945, 1951 (2019) (noting that the jurisdictional requirements of Article
In sum, while the Court has described third-party standing as an “alternative threshold question whether [plaintiffs] have standing to raise the rights of others,” it views this question as “prudential” and distinct from “the constitutional minimum of standing, which flows from Article III‘s case-or-controversy requirement.” Kowalski, 543 U.S. at 129–30.
Our Precedent. Concluding that the third-party standing doctrine is not jurisdictional is also consistent with our treatment of a similar question regarding antitrust standing. See Hartig, 836 F.3d at 269. Antitrust standing, like shareholder standing, is not an Article III standing doctrine, but
The Nature of Derivative Shareholder Harm. The very nature of the injury to shareholders in the derivative context confirms that, even when they are barred from suit under the shareholder standing rule as a prudential matter, those shareholders have constitutional standing, bringing them within the ambit of federal court jurisdiction. The facts of this case are illustrative. The disadvantageous terms of the APA, the below-market purchase price, and the disputed installment payments resulting from the Lawyers’ alleged conflicted representation inflicted a direct financial injury on the LLCs, but they also inflicted an indirect injury on the LLCs’ shareholders: the diminution of value in their ownership interests. And that injury meets all the requirements of Article III standing: the loss of financial value in their investments constitutes an injury-in-fact in that it is “actual,” “concrete[,] and particularized,” Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560 (quotations omitted), that injury was allegedly caused by the conflicted Lawyers’ involvement in their sale, and that injury, if proven at trial, can be redressed by the court through a damages award. The absence of prudential “standing” under the shareholder standing rule thus does not alter the Shareholders’ constitutional standing or the Article III jurisdiction that attends it.
In sum, the shareholder standing rule is a prudential rule, not a constitutional or jurisdictional one, and, just as in Hartig, because the Shareholders “had Article III standing sufficient to give the District Court subject matter jurisdiction, . . . a dismissal under
B. Scope of remand
Though we conclude the District Court erred by dismissing on jurisdictional grounds under
On inspection, however, it appears that the District Court‘s analysis of the Shareholders’ complaint under
Remand is also appropriate so that the District Court can consider whether the Shareholders should be permitted to amend their complaint. After the dismissal of their complaint under
Of course, “[u]ltimately, a motion to amend is committed to the ‘sound discretion of the district court.‘” In re Allergan Erisa Litig., 975 F.3d 348, 356 n.13 (3d Cir. 2020) (quoting Cureton v. Nat’l Collegiate Athletic Ass‘n, 252 F.3d 267, 272 (3d Cir. 2001)). But when a court wrongly concludes that it does not have the power to entertain amendments at all and therefore denies the motion without considering its merits, that “is not an exercise of discretion; it is merely abuse of that discretion.” Foman v. Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 182 (1962). And, in that circumstance, the order denying leave to amend must be vacated and the motion‘s merits considered on remand. See
In short, because neither the question of whether the Shareholders’ allegations successfully state a claim under the appropriate
* * *
For the foregoing reasons, we will vacate the District Court‘s order of dismissal under
