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Injury in Fact: Measuring the Causal Impact of Spokeo v. Robins on Judicial and Litigant Behavior

Author(s):
James C. Cooper, Bruce Kobayashi, Sasha Romanosky
Posted:
03-2026
Law & Economics #:
26-06

ABSTRACT:

Spokeo v. Robins represented a potentially sweeping change to standing doctrine, but its lack of clarity  left its ultimate impact on the law uncertain.  Several studies have measured Twiqbal’s impact, but to our knowledge, Spokeo’s impact has received no empirical attention despite its potential to nullify statutory requirements. We fill this gap by examining filings from Ninth Circuit cases.  We employ a “straddle design” to control for filing selection, comparing a treatment sample exposed to Spokeo with a control sample. We find evidence of large defendant motion selection and early settlement selection.  While we find that 25 percent of cases dismissed under Spokeo would have been negatively affected compared to the counterfactual, we find mixed evidence that Spokeo actually changed the legal standard.  The impact of Spokeo (both selection and judicial treatment) is confined to class actions, with any judicial treatment effects primarily concentrated on TCPA cases.