Case 1:21-cv-11269-FDS Document 67 Filed 11/22/21 Page 17 of 58
Port Authority imposed on third-party freight companies that the shippers hired to transport goods. See 958 F.3d 38, 44 (1st Cir. 2020). The court rejected the suit for lack of standing, holding that the shippers’ alleged injury was not “fairly traceable” to the Port Authority, but instead to the “independent” pricing decisions of the third-party freight companies. Id. at 48-49. The Port Authority did not “coerce[]” freight companies to charge higher prices to the shippers, and it was purely speculative that the freight companies would have charged any less had the Port Authority not imposed the fees. Id. at 49. Indeed, even if the fees had been repealed, the freight companies still could have “injur[ed]” the shippers in the same way by choosing not to “lower the costs they charge.” Id. Of particular relevance here, courts have held that even domestic governmental entities lack standing to sue firearms companies for remote harms inflicted by third parties engaged in criminal gun violence. In Ganim, for example, the city of Bridgeport sued firearms manufacturers claiming that their products “end[ed] up in the hands of unauthorized and unintended users who then misuse them in Bridgeport,” causing harm to the city’s government. 780 A.2d at 123. But in light of the numerous “links in the factual chain,” the court held that the harms inflicted by third-party criminals were too “indirect, remote[,] and derivative,” and thus the city “lack[ed] standing.” Id. The same was true in Camden County, where the court held that the county government lacked “constitutional standing” because its asserted injuries resulting from third-party criminal gun violence that were “several steps removed” from the “allegedly wrongful conduct” of the defendant firearms manufacturers. 123 F. Supp. 2d at 257. And as detailed below, multiple courts have reached the same result by applying the doctrine of proximate cause to dismiss claims based on remote harms.
8
