Frank v. Gaos
The Supreme Court sent a class-action settlement between Google and search-engine users back to the lower courts, without deciding whether paying millions to outside charities instead of class members was fair.
The Court said the lower courts never properly checked whether the people who sued Google actually had legal standing to be in court in the first place, a question that became newly important after a later Supreme Court ruling on what counts as a real injury.
“We have an obligation to assure ourselves of litigants’ standing under Article III.”
The Court's reason for sending the case back before addressing the settlement's fairness.
How it got here: A federal trial court approved the settlement, the Ninth Circuit affirmed, and objecting class members asked the Supreme Court to review whether the settlement was fair.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Google users sued the company, claiming it violated a federal privacy law by sharing their search terms with websites they clicked on through Google's search results. The parties reached a settlement giving over $5 million to outside charities and $2 million to the lawyers, but nothing directly to the people in the class. Some class members objected, arguing this kind of payout was unfair.
The question before the Court
Could Google settle a class-action lawsuit over search-term tracking by paying millions to charities instead of class members, before anyone checked whether the plaintiffs even had a right to sue?
Why it matters
The decision leaves the fairness of cy pres-only class settlements unresolved for now, but it signals that courts must confirm plaintiffs have a genuine, concrete injury before approving settlements that pay charities instead of class members. Companies and consumers involved in similar class actions will have to wait longer for clarity on whether these arrangements are lawful.
What changes now
The case goes back to the lower courts, which must first decide whether any of the named plaintiffs had a concrete enough injury to sue under the tougher standard set out in Spokeo. Only if standing is established can the courts return to the underlying question of whether the settlement's charity-only payout was fair to the class. The Supreme Court expressed no view on how that standing question should come out.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether cy pres-only settlements — where money goes to charities instead of class members — can ever satisfy the requirement that class settlements be fair, reasonable, and adequate. It only decided that standing must be resolved first.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Thomas
“a plaintiff seeking to vindicate a private right need only allege an invasion of that right to establish standing.”Thomas's view that the plaintiffs already had standing without further proceedings.
Justice Thomas would have skipped the standing remand and decided the merits himself. He argued that alleging a violation of a privacy statute that creates a private right is itself enough to establish standing, so there was no need to send the case back on that question. He would have reversed and held that the settlement should never have been approved, because it gave class members no money, no meaningful injunctive relief, and no other real benefit while giving lawyers and named plaintiffs significant payouts.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Federal courts must confirm they have the power to hear a case before approving anything, including a class-action settlement, and that power depends on at least one named plaintiff having Article III standing — a real, concrete injury the court can address.
- The trial court had initially found standing based on a Ninth Circuit rule (from a case called Edwards) holding that simply alleging a statute was violated was enough to sue, without needing any additional real-world harm.
- After that ruling, the Supreme Court decided Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, which held that a plaintiff must show a concrete injury even when suing under a statute — merely pointing to a legal violation is not automatically enough.
- Because Google had dropped its standing argument only in reliance on the now-abrogated Edwards rule, no court had ever actually tested the plaintiffs' standing under the tougher Spokeo standard.
- Since the Court reviews issues developed by the lower courts rather than resolving them for the first time, it concluded the standing question should be decided by the district court or the court of appeals before any settlement can be evaluated.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins (578 U. S. ___)
The Court relies on Spokeo's rule that alleging a statutory violation alone does not automatically establish a concrete injury.