Last November, a shareholder of OSI Systems, Inc. filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California challenging California's law imposing female director quotas on publicly traded corporations headquartered in California. Meland v. Padilla, U.S. Dist. Ct. Case No. 2:19-cv--02288-JAM-AC. The complaint names California's Secretary of State Alex Padilla as a defendant in his official capacity. Secretary Padilla has moved to dismiss the complaint for lack of standing. Earlier this week, the plaintiff, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation filed its opposition.
To survive Secretary Padilla's motion to dismiss, the plaintiff must be able to establish standing under Article III of the United States Constitution. Although Secretary Padilla is also challenging the plaintiff's standing in a separate suit filed in state court, the two standing arguments are completely different. To establish federal standing, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that a plaintiff show:
- it has suffered an "injury in fact" that is (a) concrete and particularized and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical;
- the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant; and
- it is likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.
