{1} This аppeal raises questions as to the continued viability of New Mexico’s enduring justiciability principles that govern who has standing to bring suit in our state courts. Our current standing doctrine generally requires litigants to allege three elements: (1) they are directly injured as a result of the action they seek to challenge; (2) there is a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct; and (3) the injury is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision. These requirements are known in short form as injury in fact, causation, and redressability, and are derived from federal standing jurisprudence.
{2} Plaintiffs seek to mount a pre-enforcement constitutional challenge to an ordinance passed by the City of Albuquerque, and they ask this Court to perform a comprehensive overhaul of New Mexico standing jurisprudence for them to do so. Specifically, Plaintiffs encourage us to abandon the traditional three federally-derived elements and instead implement an approach whereby courts would evaluate four “prudential factors” to determine whether a litigant has standing to sue. We do not find occasion in this case to depart from our traditional standing analysis, and therefore we affirm the Court of Appeals’ decision holding that Plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the City’s ordinance.
BACKGROUND
{3} The ACLU and two named Plaintiffs filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive
{4} The amended Ordinance declares that a vehicle “[ojperated by a person who has been arrested for an offense of driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor or drugs” is a nuisance and subjeсts such a vehicle to “temporary seizure or permanent forfeiture.” Albuquerque, N.M., Ordinance § 7-6-2 and - 4 (16th Council). The owner of a seized vehicle may request an administrative hearing at which a city hearing officer “shall only determine whether the law enforcement officer had probable cause to seize the vehicle.” Section 7-6-5(D)(8). If the hearing officer determines that there was probable cause to seize the vehicle, “proceedings for an order for forfeiture shall be instituted promptly.” Id.
{5} The City filed several motions, including a motion to dismiss for lack of standing, and Plaintiffs filed a motion for permanent injunction. The district court denied the City’s motion to dismiss and granted Plaintiffs’ motion for permanent injunction, finding that the Ordinance provides insufficiеnt procedural due process. Specifically, the court found that the Ordinance is constitutionally defective because it states that the only determination to be made at the administrative hearing is “whether the law enforcement officer had probable cause to seize the vehicle,” as opposed to whether there was probable cause for the arrest. The City appealed the district court’s decision, and the Court of Appeals reversed, finding that Plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the ordinance. See ACLU v. City of Albuquerque (ACLU II),
DISCUSSION
{6} At the incеption of the case, there were three Plaintiffs, the ACLU and two individuals. One of the individual plaintiffs was dismissed by stipulation, leaving Peter Simonson, the executive director and a member of the ACLU, as the remaining named Plaintiff. In the complaint, Simonson alleged that his “rights, status or other legal relations are affected by [the Ordinance].” The ACLU alleged that it had “standing to vindicate the public interest in matters of great public ... importance,” and to “vindicate the interest of its members who will be subject to [the Ordinance], and whose rights, status or other legal relations are affected by [the Ordinance].” Whether Plaintiffs have standing to challenge the Ordinance is a matter of law subject to de novo review. See Forest Guardians v. Powell,
The Law of Standing
{7} The Court of Appeals bеgan its standing analysis by stating: “Under our Constitution, in order to have standing, a plaintiff must establish that there is (1) an injury in fact, (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.” ACLU II,
{8} Based on the proposition that standing in state court is a prudential matter, Plaintiffs argue for a fundamental revision of our law of standing. They advocate an abandonment of the three federally-derived traditional standing requirements — injury in fact, causation, and redressability — which are borrowed to a large degree from federal standing jurisprudence. In place of those requirements, Plaintiffs would have us adopt four “prudential factors,” drawn from prior New Mexico appellatе decisions on standing. These factors are: (1) the degree of potential harm to the plaintiff and the seriousness of the constitutional or legal challenge; (2) the public importance of the issue; (3) the extent to which the plaintiff can bring to bear the concrete adverseness that will sharpen the issue for the court; and (4) with respect to organizational plaintiffs, the degree of difficulty in obtaining individual plaintiffs to step forward on an issue of public importance. According to Plaintiffs, our state courts should evaluate and weigh these factors in deciding whether a plaintiff has standing to sue in a given case.
{9} We agree with Plaintiffs that standing in our courts is not derived from the state constitution, and is not jurisdictional.
1
As we recognized in New Mexicо Right to Choose/NARAL v. Johnson,
“Injunction is not a remedy which may be invoked by the citizen for the purpose of controlling public officers or tribunals in the exercise of their functions. In order to sustain it, the plaintiff must show that he has a special interest, in respect to which hе will suffer special injury. It is not enough that the community in which he resides will be injuriously affected by some governmental or legislative action.”
Injury in Fact
{11} Of most significance in the instant case is the injury in fact requirement. Injury in fact has evolved in New Mexico jurisprudence in response to developments in federal law that created a more flexible standard, departing from older, more formalistic notions of a “legally protected interest.” See De Vargas Sav. & Loan Ass’n v. Campbell,
{12} Further, like federal law, our courts have allowed organizations to sue if their individual members would have standing in their own right. See, e.g., Nat’l Trust for Historic Pres. v. City of Albuquerque,
{13} Plaintiffs’ suggested “prudential factors” are an amalgamation of the above principles, with the notable absence of the three traditional, federally-derived standing requirements that form the jurisdictional threshold in federal courts. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife,
{14} While we acknowledge the criticisms of the causation and redressability components, we are mainly concerned here with the injury in fact requirement, as that is the point upon which this case turns when the traditional three-prong test is applied. 3 Indeed, Plaintiffs implicitly recognize this by making the elimination of the injury in fact element the focal point of their suggested approach. In place of the requirement that a litigant show a direct injury that is actual or imminent, Plaintiffs would substitute an inquiry into the degree or magnitude of the potential harm to an individual if an injury were to occur — the challenged ordinance were to be enforced unconstitutionally — and the seriousness of the constitutional issues involved.
{15} In support of their contention that courts should look to the magnitude of potential harm instead of the threat of injury to a particular plaintiff, Plaintiffs cite to two New Mexico cases in which they assert the court found standing based on the seriousness of the potential injury. In De Vargas, the state supervisor of the banking department granted authority to a Los Alamos building and loan association to operate an office in Santa Fe.
{16} In Com, a workers compensation claimant challenged the attornеys’ fees cap in the Workers Compensation Act, claiming that it violated the equal protection clause.
{17} Plaintiffs claim that at the core of the holdings in De Vargas and Com was the court’s consideration that the potential injury could be very serious. In other words, if the potential harm is of sufficient magnitude, then the threat of such harm to some unknown person will be sufficient to confer standing without requiring a direct injury, either actual or imminent, to a particular plaintiff. With respect, we think Plaintiffs misread these opinions.
{18} Both De Vargas and Com explicitly focused on the direct nature of the threat of harm to the particular plaintiff, not the magnitude of that harm. Indeed, both courts expressly recognized that, once the plaintiff has alleged that he is among those who are directly injured or imminently threatened with injury, the alleged injury itself need only be slight. De Vargas,
{19} Though we recognize there may be difficulties with the injury in fact requirement in certain cases, we decline Plaintiffs’ invitation to do away with that element as part of our general approach to standing, particularly as applied in the instant case. Requiring that the party bringing suit show that he is injured or threatened with injury in a direct and concrete way serves well-established goals of sound judicial policy. See Wis. Bankers Ass’n v. Mut. Sav. & Loan Ass’n,
While it does not matter how many persons have been injured by the challenged action, the party bringing suit must show that the action injures him in a concrete and personal way. This requirement is not just an empty formality. It preserves the vitality of the adversarial process by assuring both that the parties before the court have an actual, as opposed to a professed, stake in the outcome, and that the legal questions presented ... will be resolved, not in the ratified atmosphere of a debating society, but in a concrete factual context conducive to a realistic appreciation of the consequences of judicial action.
{20} Beyond the strength of the policies underlying the three-prong approach to standing, and particularly the injury in fact requirement, that approach is deeply ingrained in New Mexico jurisprudence. To abandon a test that has essentially formed the basis of New Mexico’s entire body of case law on standing, a body of law that has extensive historical roots, would require a
{21} Plaintiffs’ approach seems to exchange a rule-based system that, though perhaps subject to criticism, at least contains standards with identifiable contours and boundaries, for an impulse-based, visceral typе of evaluation. Thus, if lower courts were directed to evaluate the seriousness of the potential harm, which Plaintiffs essentially define as any constitutional harm, and the public importance of the issue to determine standing, it is difficult to see how the ultimate determination would not be merely a reflection of the whim of the particular judge. Without a more concrete explanation of how Plaintiffs’ proposed factors provide meaningful and predictable guidelines for determining whether a particular plaintiff has standing to sue, we will not deviate from New Mexico’s time-honored approach which overall has served us well.
{22} To clarify, we do not reject outright Plaintiffs’ prudential factors. As noted previously, each оf those factors is already incorporated in some fashion into our current approach to standing, and are helpful points for guidance and analysis. We only reject those factors as surrogates for injury in fact. Because we do not adopt Plaintiffs’ proposed prudential factors for determining standing, and instead elect to maintain the basic legal framework set out in our prior standing ease law, we now apply that framework to the current case.
Under Our Traditional Standing Jurisprudence, Plaintiffs do not Have Standing to Bring Their Claim
{23} As we have said, under a traditional standing analysis, this case turns on the first of the three elements — injury in fact. Plaintiffs claim that “the instant Ordinance places everyone who drives within the city limits of Albuquerque, including [Simon-son] and other members of ACLU-NM, in imminent harm because it punishes based on arrest, not upon a finding of guilt.” According to Plaintiffs, the injury that would confer standing in this case consists of Simonson, or another ACLU member, having to drive under the fear that he will be erroneously arrested for DWI, which will trigger a chain reaction that results in forfeiture of his vehicle. “Plaintiffs argue that, since it is not illegal to drive a vehicle or to drink before driving a vehicle, so long as the driver’s blood alcohol concentration is within statutory limits, the Ordinance potentially subjects drivers who drink, but are not intoxicated under our laws, to the threat of forfeiture of the vehicle that they are driving.” ACLU II,
{24} We agree with the Court of Appeals that this asserted injury is simply too speculative with respect to Simonson оr any individual driver who is an ACLU member to meet the injury in fact standard. As noted by the Court of Appeals, Simonson’s vehicle could only be forfeited in the manner alleged if the following contingencies were to take place: “(1) he drinks an amount of alcohol that does not raise his blood alcohol concentration above statutory limits, (2) he is stopped by police and arrested for driving while intoxicated, (3) he has his vehicle seized, (4) he requests a hearing as provided by Section 7-6-5 of the Ordinance, (5) the hearing officer finds that police did have probable cause to seize the vehicle, and (6) the City is successful in obtaining an order of forfeiture from the district court.” Id. Plaintiffs cannot even demonstrate that the triggering event for apрlication of the Ordinance — an arrest for driving while intoxicated — is imminent or likely with respect to Simonson or any individual ACLU member.
{25} While we acknowledge that perhaps the other contingencies need not necessarily take place for a driver to attain standing to challenge the Ordinance on constitutional grounds, at the very least a plaintiff must be able to demonstrate a high probability of arrest for his own actions. It may be true that demonstrating such a high probability of
{26} Analogizing this case to ACLU I, Plaintiffs argue that they did not need to wait until the Ordinance was enforced and they were actually injured to challenge the constitutionality of the Ordinance. In ACLU I, a group of teenagers, their parents, and a business owner, along with the ACLU, brought suit against the City of Albuquerque challenging the constitutionality of the City’s juvenile curfew ordinance along with the program implemented to enforce that ordinance.
When contesting the constitutionality of a criminal statute, it is not necessary that [the plaintiff] first expose himself [or herself] to actual arrest or prosecution to be entitled to challenge [the] statute that he [or she] claims deters the exercise of his [or her] constitutional rights. When the plaintiff has alleged an intention to engage in a course of conduct arguably affected with a constitutional interest, but proscribed by a statute, and there exists a credible threat of prosecution thereunder, he [or she] should not be required to await and undergo а criminal prosecution as the sole means of seeking relief.
ACLU I,
{27} We do not find ACLU I persuasive in our analysis of standing in the instant case. Unlike the curfew ordinance, it is difficult to see how the Ordinance in this case proscribes a course of conduct “arguably affected with a constitutional interest.” The Ordinance dictates a consequence resulting from a DWI arrest; it does not make illegal any particular course of conduct that was previously permitted. Thus, the Ordinance in this case is very difficult to analogize to the curfew ordinance in ACLU I in terms of establishing a credible threat of prosecution, or a “real risk” of injury.
{28} The plaintiffs in ACLU I could demonstrate that they themselves were highly likely to be arrested for violating the curfew if they stayed out past the time specified in the ordinance, simply by virtue of the fact that they were of a certain age and because the City had demonstrated its intent to apprehend individuals in violation of the curfew. This credible threat of prosecution, and the consequent chilling effect on constitutionally protected activities such as freedom of assembly and the liberty to move about freely, was therefore sufficient to establish an imminent injury or a real risk of injury to the particular plaintiffs. In this way, ACLU I is similar to cases allowing pre-enforcement overbreadth challenges to statutes that affect First Amendment rights due to the chilling effect on freedom of expression. See, e.g., State v. James M.,
{29} In the instant case, Plaintiffs cannot show a high likelihood that Simonson or any individual ACLU member will even be arrested for DWI, let alone wrongly arrested for DWI, and therefore exposed to the ultimate
Organizational Standing
{30} An organization’s standing to sue is premised on the standing of its individual members. Thus, “an association has standing to bring suit on behalf of its members when: (a) its members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right; (b) the interests it seeks to protect are germane to the organization’s purpose; and (c) neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participаtion of individual members in the lawsuit.” Forest Guardians,
{31} Plaintiffs appear to make a separate argument for third-party standing by claiming that this case is one where “very important interests are at stake and those parties directly affected are unlikely or unable to assert those important interests.” As we noted previously, a litigant may assert the rights of third parties if she can show that: (1) the litigant herself has “suffered an injury in fact, thus giving ... her a sufficiеntly concrete interest in the outcome of the issue in dispute;” (2) the litigant has “a close relation to the third party;” and (3) there exists “some hindrance to the third party’s ability to protect his or her own interests.” N.M. Right to Choose/NARAL,
{32} Further, regardless of the absence of an injury in fact, there is no indication that any person against whom the City enforces the Ordinance will be hindered from challenging the Ordinance. Cf. id. (noting that “privacy concerns and time constraints impose a significant hindrance on the ability of Medicaid-eligible women to protect their own interest in obtaining medically necessary abortions”). In fact, any рerson threatened with having a vehicle seized or forfeited for a DWI arrest will likely be highly motivated to bring such a challenge. See, e.g., One (1) 1981 White Chevy Ut.,
{33} It is clear that this Court can “confer” standing and reach the merits of a casе regardless of whether a plaintiff meets the traditional standing requirements, based on a conclusion that the questions raised involve matters of great public importance. See Kirkpatrick,
{34} Viewed in light of our precedent, the instаnt ease does not raise the kind of questions that this Court has deemed to be of great public importance such that we would elect to confer standing when it is not otherwise present. The question of whether the Ordinance violates due process by allowing forfeiture of a vehicle based only on an arrest does not implicate “the integrity of state government,” in terms of separation of powers, or “the state’s definition of itself as a sovereign.” Forest Guardians,
CONCLUSION
{35} For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals reversing the district court and dissolving the permanent injunction.
{36} IT IS SO ORDERED.
Notes
. We do note, however, that standing may be a jurisdictional matter when a litigant asserts a cause of action created by statute. As the Pennsylvania Superior Court explained: "When a statute creates a cause of action and designates who may sue, the issue of standing becomes interwoven with that of subject matter jurisdiction. Standing then becomes a jurisdictional prerequisite to an action.” In re Adoption of W.C.K.,
. We acknowledge the oft-quoted statement that "[t]he requirements for standing derive from constitutional provisions, enacted statutes and rules, and prudential considerations.” John Does I through III,
. We remain open to suggestions regarding changes to the second and third prongs of the traditional standing test. However, we focus solely on the injury in fact element here, without discussing the remaining elements.