BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v.

CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE
ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 151111 Argued November 15, 2016Decided November 18, 2016

Mitchell Feinberg
Advanced Legislation: Statutory Interpretation
November 18, 2016

JUSTICE FEINBERG delivered the opinion of the Court.

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
The Fair Housing Act (FHA), 42 U.S.C. 3613 (a)(1)(A), permits civil suits by private
aggrieved person[s] in federal and state court to obtain appropriate relief in response to a
discriminatory housing practice. This law grants a statutory private cause of action without
which private parties would likely not have Article III standing.1 The language limiting suits to
an aggrieved person was found in the original 1968 version of the statute, and this language
remained after the 1988 amendments to the Act.2
Plaintiff, the City of Miami, has brought a Fair Housing Act lawsuit against the Bank of
America, alleging that the defendant has engaged in a continuing pattern of discriminatory
mortgage lending practices prohibited under the FHA which resulted in a higher incidence of
foreclosures for minority borrowers. Resp. Brief in Opposition, App. B, 8a. The plaintiff has
brought this suit for the economic impact of the Banks alleged policies, which it claims
caused a disproportionately high number of foreclosures and led to decreased property values
of surrounding properties. Id. at 8a, 12a. The City of Miami seeks money damages for loss of
property tax revenue, for expenditures of heightened municipal services in these areas of blight,
and injunctive relief to stop further economic harm. Id. at 45a-55a.
The Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida granted defendants motion
to dismiss for lack of standing; the court held that both Article III standing and statutory standing
are required to bring a suit under the FHA and that statutory standing includes zone of interests
and proximate causation elements. App. to Cert. Pet. 64a. The District Court interpreted this
Courts holding in Lexmark Intern., Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 1377
(2014) to require a more limited class of plaintiffs than Article III standing would permit.
1 See Trafficante v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 409 U.S. 205, 212 (1972) (J. White, concurring).
2 Compare Civil Rights Act of 1968 810(a) (1968) and 42 U.S.C. 3613 (a)(1)(A) (1988).
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BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
Because the plaintiff pled merely economic injuries that were not somehow affected by a
racial interest, the District Court found that the City of Miami was outside the zone of interests
of the FHA and therefore lacks standing. App. to Cert. Pet. 68a. The District Court also found
that the proximate causation element of statutory standing was not adequately alleged, for the
City only offered vague and generalized allegations of harm. Id. at 70a. After this dismissal,
the plaintiff submitted the First Amended Complaint and asked the District Court to grant a
motion for reconsideration. This motion was denied, and plaintiff appealed to the Eleventh
Circuit.
On appeal of the motion to dismiss, the Eleventh Circuit reversed, first holding that a
zone of interests analysis does not apply to the FHA, for the statutory standing is coextensive
with Article III standing. App. to Cert. Pet. at 19a. Reviewing the issue of statutory standing
under the FHA, the Eleventh Circuit found that they were bound by this Courts holdings in
Trafficante v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 409 U.S. 205 (1972), Gladstone Realtors v. Village of
Bellwood, 441 U.S. 91 (1979), and Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363 (1982), that
statutory standing under the FHA is as broad as is constitutionally permissible under Article
III. App. to Cert. Pet. 27a. Furthermore, the Eleventh Circuit held that the City of Miami
properly pled proximate cause, because it alleged more than mere Article III traceability but was
not required to show directness. Id. at 36a. The Eleventh Circuit held that on a foreseeability
analysis, the defendant was able to reasonable foresee the resulting harm. Id. at 38a.
We granted certiorari to determine the statutory standing requirement under the FHA,
with regard to the interpretation of the modifier aggrieved person, and to resolve the circuit

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
split between the Eleventh Circuit and the Second,3 Fifth,4 and Ninth Circuits5 on the questions
of the pleading standard for proximate cause. We now reverse.
I
The analysis of the statutory standing under the FHA in part turns on a proper understanding of
this Courts past decisions from Trafficante to Lexmark. Plaintiffs argue that the holding in
Trafficante, subsequently affirmed in Gladstone and Havens, is still controlling and has not been
modified by our recent cases. Plaintiff misinterprets our holdings in Thompson and Lexmark and
therefore reaches an incorrect result.
A
In Trafficante, 409 U.S. at 208, this Court was faced with the question of whether tenants
who themselves had not been discriminated against could sue the apartment owner under the
FHA for the loss of an integrated community. We answered that question in the affirmative,
deferring to the Solicitor Generals interpretation that standing extends to the Article III limits;
yet we limited this holding only insofar as tenants of the same housing unit . . . are concerned.
Id. at 209.
In our subsequent decision in Gladstone, 441 U.S. at 109, and Havens, 455 U.S. at 372,
this Court affirmed the holding in Trafficante, and expanded that holding, essentially opening up
FHA standing to all plaintiffs who can meet the Article III requirements. While such decisions
were not inconsistent with Trafficante, they was notably broader than the limited holding in

3 See Henrietta D. v. Bloomberg, 331 F.3d 261, 278-79 (2d Cir. 2003).
4 See Aransas Project v. Shaw, 775 F.3d 641, 658 (5th Cir. 2014).
5 See Ray Charles Foundation v. Robinson, 795 F.3d 1109, 1124 (9th Cir. 2015).
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BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
Trafficante.6 In Gladstone, 441 U.S. at 110, the crux of the claim was that the Village of
Bellwood was robbed of its racial balance and stability by practices that would replace the
integrated neighborhood with a segregated one. Yet the facts of that case are still quite
distinguishable from the case at bar; here, the City of Miami is concerned not with the
integration of its community but with the problems flowing from foreclosures that allegedly have
a disparate impact on minorities. As Justice Lynch aptly states in his concurrence, the plaintiffs in
Gladstone and Havens were clearly within the FHAs zone of interests and thus the broad
holdings were peripheral dicta. Lynch, J. at 1 (concurring).
In 2011, this Court decided Thompson, 562 U.S. at 177, holding in the context of Title
VII that the term person aggrieved must be construed more narrowly than the outer boundaries
of Article III. Since the holding in Trafficante only pertained to individuals living in the same
housing unit, this Court decided in Thompson not to apply the dictum that was based on, at the
time, the Solicitor Generals interpretation of the Fair Housing Act. Although in Trafficante we
deferred to the SGs statutory interpretation, it has remained our prerogative to read person
aggrieved to require a narrower standing requirement than Article III. The holding in Thompson
was made in order to avoid the absurd consequences of a growing class of plaintiffs suing
under the FHA, such as a shareholder suing a company for racial discrimination against an
employee. Thompson, 562 U.S. at 176-77.
In the present case, the Petitioners at oral argument presented a similar hypothetical of a
bakery owner, who would be able to make out a cognizable FHA claim due to the loss of revenue
flowing from nearby foreclosures. This scenario is directly analogous to the shareholder example
6 See Thompson v. North American Stainless, LP., 562 U.S. 170, 176 (2011) (Later opinions, we must
acknowledge, reiterate that the term aggrieved in Title VIII reaches as far as Article III permits.).

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
this Court stated in Thompson; just like the shareholder, the bakery owner is not the beneficiary
of the FHA likely intended by Congress. In deciding the case at bar, we decline to follow the
broad dicta in Gladstone and Havens, as they have been superseded by our recent decisions in
Thompson and Lexmark.
B
We find that the plain meaning of the term aggrieved person is linguistically more
restrictive than if congress had said any person, as it happened to do in the Endangered Species
Act, 16 U.S.C. 1540(g).7 This analysis is best supported by the Surplusage Canon (verba cum
effectu sunt accipienda), which dictates that words should not be ignored or read as obsolete, for
each word was included in order to give effect to a particular concept. See Antonin Scalia,
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 174 (2012). If we are to equate aggrieved
person with person then we are contravening this canon by giving the word aggrieved a
redundant meaning. The plain-meaning analysis suggests that, by requiring an aggrieved
person, there must be a more restrictive standing requirement than that of Article III on potential
plaintiffs, even if this limitation is only slightly more restrictive than Article III standing. The
zone of interests analysis would adequately fit the plain reading of the text, as it is a relatively
weak requirement to meet: that the plaintiffs interests [cannot be] . . . so marginally related to
or inconsistent with the purposes implicit in the statute that it cannot reasonably be assumed that
Congress intended to permit the suit.8
7 Incidentally, our decision to read aggrieved person differently from any person is also supported by the
Related-Statutes Canon (known as in pari materia), which would suggest that the text of the Fair Housing Act
should be interpreted together with the Endangered Species Act. See Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The
Interpretation of Legal Texts 252 (2012). The Related-Statutes Canon would support the interpretation that in the
Endangered Species Act Congress expressly waived the zone-of-interests test, but in the Fair Housing Act, Congress
did not do the same by saying aggrieved.
8 Thompson, 562 U.S. at 178 (quoting Clarke v. Securities Industry Assn., 479 U.S. 388, 399-400 (1987)).

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
Furthermore, we decline to construe the term aggrieved as plaintiffs urge us to, for
absurd results would occur if too broad of a reading is given to this phrase. Since any person can
claim to be aggrieved due to a highly attenuated chain of events that leads to some purported
economic loss, allowing the relaxed standing requirement of Article III would lead to a flood of
litigation from parties that Congress did not intend to benefit under the Fair Housing Act. In
reading the term aggrieved to require a zone-of-interests test, we are in part applying the
Absurdity Doctrine, namely that reading aggrieved too broadly would result in a disposition
that no reasonable person could approve. See Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation
of Legal Texts 234 (2012).
The City of Miami would suggest that we are in fact wrong about Congress intent
concerning the Fair Housing Act, based on their reading of the applicable legislative history. As a
matter of principle, we find it generally inappropriate for this Court to weigh the cherry-picked
transcripts of hearings before Congress as part of our interpretation of statutory texts. This is
because these debates do not necessarily reflect later compromises made by Congressmen voting
on the legislation, nor do these represent the body of Congress as a whole.9 The text of the
statute, however, does represent what the majority of both houses of congress voted for and what
the President signed.10 Unlike the record of Congressional hearings, it is our view that it is
acceptable for this Court to look at past iterations of a particular law to see what language
9 While Chief Justice Azmats discussion of legislative history demonstrates that it does not clearly weigh in favor
of the petitioners nor respondents, I do not agree that looking to the Hearings Before the Senate Subcommittee on
Housing & Urban Affairs of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, see Azmat, C. J. at 7, is the
appropriate role of this Court, both for fear of competency to evaluate this history and for fear of it being
unrepresentative of Congress.
10 We see the institutional role of the courts in statutory interpretation as looking at the text, but also looking at
context to determine the meaning of what was passed. However, the usage of legislative debate records ignores the
institutional role of Congress, in that what counts as law must go through bicameralism and presentment. See John
Manning, Second Generation Textualism, 98 Cal. L. Rev. 1287, 1306 (2010).

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
Congress altered. In the case of the FHA, the relevant statute was amended in 1988, and Justice
Lynch points out that these amendments perpetuated the language limiting suits to an aggrieved
person in the amended statute. This would seem to suggest that Congress intended to continue
limiting the FHA suits to aggrieved persons. As to Congress awareness of the Courts
interpretation of aggrieved, although the 1988 amendments took place after Gladstone and
Havens, see Knoll, J. at 3 (dissenting), the amendments also postdated Administrative Procedure
Act cases in which aggrieved was held to implicate a zone-of-interests test. See Lynch, J. at 2,
n. 3 (concurring).
The above analysis should be helpful in illuminating the reasoning behind our decision in
Thompson and applying such reasoning to Title VIII.11 In our recent decision in Lexmark, 134 S.
Ct. at 1389, this Court clearly stated that there is a presumption that a statutory cause of action
extends only to plaintiffs whose interests fall within the zone of interests protected by the law
invoked and that such a requirement applies to all statutorily created causes of action. We
hereby affirm our holding in Lexmark as it applies to suits under the Fair Housing Act and
decline to follow our previous holding in Gladstone and Havens.
C
Now that we have clarified the applicability of a zone of interests test to FHA standing, we
must look to the City of Miamis complaint to determine if is falls within that zone. In analyzing
this question there are some guidelines that we can provide, but this analysis is inextricably
wound up in the proximate cause inquiry of how attenuated or direct is the chain of causation.
11 As Chief Justice Azmat noted on page 6, footnote 10 of his opinion, the textual similarity between Title VII
and Title VIII is further evidence that the approach we adopt is appropriate. In addition to our holding in Smith v.
City of Jackson, 544 U.S. 228 (2005) concerning the similarities between the Age Discrimination in Employment
Act and Title VII, which Azmat, C. J. cites, our decision to apply the Title VII holding to Title VIII is supported
more generally by the in pari materia canon. See supra, Note 7.

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
The zone of interests test is statute-specific, and in the context of the FHA the class of
plaintiffs that fall outside of this zone are those third-parties seeking only to redress economic
harm.
As for the facts of the present case, we find the District Courts opinion in the denial of
reconsideration to be compelling. At first, the plaintiffs did not allege any non-economic interest
in preventing the alleged discriminatory behavior, and the District Court (which is more familiar
with the way in which the case was handled at the outset) clearly stated that these non-economic
claims were improperly raised as grounds for reconsideration because they were claims it
never made and amendments it did not previously raise or offer despite ample opportunity. App.
to Cert. Pet. 82a. Moreover, the District Court noted that sprinkling in allegations that the City
has a generalized interest in racial integration falls far short of alleging facts sufficient to
demonstrate that Defendants lending practices adversely affected the racial diversity or
integration of the City. Id. at 82a, n. 18. Most importantly, Justice Robb raises an excellent point
in his concurrence that this whole lawsuit is premised on economic harm that is entirely
separable from the issue of housing discrimination. Robb, J. at 3 (concurring). Justice Robb
emphasizes that if the discriminatory practices either did not affect Miamis municipal funds, or
if they somehow augmented Miamis municipal funds then the alleged economic harm to the
City of Miami would disappear, nonwithstanding the presence of discrimination. Id. As a result
of the facts presented here, we agree with the District Courts rationale and hold that the City of
Miami does not fall within the statutory zone of interests of the FHA.
In the counterfactual scenario in which the City of Miami had alleged more substantial
facts related to the loss of integration and diversity due to the actions of the Bank of America, the

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
zone-of-interests analysis may have changed.12 The zone of interests for the FHA, as we hold
here, specifically encompasses those parties whose interests align with Congress intent in
passing the Fair Housing Act. By alleging virtually only economic harm, the City of Miami fails
the test; yet this result may have been different if the City were seeking solely injunctive relief to
prevent the spread of de-facto segregation. Or alternatively, if the City had sought money
damages on behalf of the victims of housing discrimination, that would have improved their case,
as would seeking money damages to go towards anti-discrimination works of the City
government.13
In this case, however, the harm claimed was not only so attenuated in nature from the
direct victims, but it was the type of harm not intended by Congress to be redressed under the
FHA. The zone of interests test proposed by Justice Kika is too broad for this very reason. Justice
Kika agrees with the conclusion that the zone of interests test applies and is more limiting than
Article III standing, but he writes that the Citys legitimate interest in ensuring fair housing and
protecting those under its jurisdiction warrant finding the City within the zone. Even using that
language, the City does not pass the test that Justice Kika himself lays out, for this entire
litigation was plainly pursued to protect the Citys own tax revenue, not the victims of
discrimination who live in its jurisdiction. Further, on Justice Kikas reasoning, any business
(like the bakery referenced above) could claim that it cares deeply about the interests of the
community at large, but simply stating that should not be enough.
12 This would probably not be outcome determinative, however, because the proximate cause requirement would
likely still not be met by the statistics cited in the pleadings.
13 Part of the reason why these counterfactuals may have changed the zone-of-interests determination is because of
the different chain of causation. By extensively alleging (unlike what they did here) harm to integration and social
cohesion, the City of Miamis injury forms a closer nexus to the discriminatory acts of the Bank of America. That
said, there may still be insurmountable proximate cause issues, related to the soundness of the statistics presented by
the plaintiff.

BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
Justice Knoll reaches the same conclusion in her dissenting opinion as Justice Kika on the
issue of zone of interests; yet she too assumes her own conclusion in her premises. Justice Knoll
stresses that the City of Miami has pled an injury to an integrated community (that those words
are in the complaint is not in contention), but doubles down on this by saying that the harm to
property values mirrors the harm that arises from the lost opportunities and benefits available in
an integrated community. (emphasis added) This is an overdramatized assertion, as the two
events are at-best tenuously connected. As noted above, it is purely a contingent matter that the
discrimination may be connected to this particular decrease in property values in the case at bar.
Justice Knoll attempts to support her argument that the City of Miami is aggrieved by claiming
that cities are unique in their duty to ensure fair housing, because communities as a whole
are harmed by discriminatory housing. This argument is not persuasive, however, because the
problem in the case at bar is precisely that the City has not adequately shown that it is harmed by
discriminatory housing, at least not in the way protected by Congress in the FHA.
As a result, we agree with the district court that the City of Miamis pleadings in this case
plainly demonstrate that the City falls outside the statutory zone of interests for the FHA.

II
An important component that is permissible for courts to incorporate in the zone of interests
analysis is the chain of causation between the alleged discriminatory behavior and the plaintiff.
In oral argument, the petitioners seemed to shy away from addressing the proximate causation

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BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
issue head-on, but we will clarify the requirement in order to prevent relitigation of the same
issue.
The Eleventh Circuit, in their opinion, held that the City of Miami properly pled
proximate cause, under a foreseeability analysis, and that this was all that was required in
addition to Article III traceability.14 The petitioners in their brief ask this Court to clarify that
there is a directness element that needs to be pled as part of proximate cause; for this proposition
they cite our recent decision in Lexmark. In this Courts opinion in Lexmark, we clearly stated
that we generally presume that a statutory cause of action is limited to plaintiffs whose injuries
are proximately caused by violations of the statute and that this general rule requires the harm to
have a sufficiently close connection to the conduct the statute prohibits. 134 S. Ct. at 1390.
This rule could not be clearer with regard to its general applicability, and therefore we agree
with Petitioners that this applies equally to the Fair Housing Act. However, because the meaning
of sufficiently close connection varies from statute to statute, there is no strict directness
requirement under the FHA. Third parties may sue for generalized non-economic harm flowing
from racial discrimination, so long as this harm is not too attenuated from the conduct at issue.
Under the facts of the case at bar, however, it is clear to the Court that proximate cause has not
been sufficiently pled. This is not because of a lack of a directness requirement, but because
more than mere foreseeability is required and the chain of causation is extremely attenuated. The
alleged discrimination itself is based on a series of statistical analysis that are not particularly
conclusive, and even if we view this evidence in the most favorable light to the plaintiffs, the
chain of causation involves: lending practices, peoples acceptance of mortgage loans,
14 App. to Cert. Pet. at 30a-31a (Although we agree with the Bank and the district court that proximate cause is a
required element of a damages claim under the FHA, we find that the City has pled it adequately.).

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BANK OF AMERICA CORP., ET AL. v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA

Opinion of the Court
foreclosures, decreased property valuations, blight, increased municipal services, and then the
economic harm to the City of Miami. This analysis not only shows that the chain of causation is
too far-fetched to meet the proximate cause requirement for statutory standing, but that our zone
of interests analysis was correct in labeling the City of Miami outside the statutory zone.
***
We reverse the Eleventh Circuits decision and uphold the District Courts dismissal of
the First Amended Complaint with prejudice.
It is so ordered.

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