This case raises the issue of standing to sue in the context of a dispute over the 1st Amendment principle of separation of church and state. The essential facts are contained in Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion.

Justice Rehnquist delivered the opinion of the Court.

... Article IV, Sec. 3, cl. 2, of the Constitution vests Congress with the "Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the ... Property belonging to the United States." Shortly after the termination of hostilities in the Second World War, Congress enacted the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949. *** The Act was designed, in part, to provide "an economical and efficient system for ... the disposal of surplus property" *** In furtherance of this policy, federal agencies are directed to maintain adequate inventories of the property under their control and to identify excess property for transfer to other agencies, able to use it. *** Property that has outlived its usefulness to the Federal Government is declared surplus" and may be transferred to private or public entities. ***

The Act authorizes the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Secretary of Education) to assume responsibility for disposing of surplus property "for school, classroom, or other educational use." *** Subject to the disapproval of the Administrator of General Services, the Secretary may sell or lease the property to non-profit, tax educational institutions for consideration that takes into account "any benefit which has accrued or may accrue to the United States" from the transferee’s use of the property.*** By regulation, the Secretary has provided for the computation of a "public benefit allowance," which discounts the transfer price of the property "on the basis of benefits to the United States from the use of such property for educational purposes." ***

The property which spawned this litigation was acquired by the Department of the Army in 1942, as part of a larger tract of approximately 181 acres of land northwest of Philadelphia. The Army built on that land the Valley Forge General Hospital, and for 30 years thereafter, that hospital provided medical care for members of the Armed Forces. In April 1973, as part of a plan to reduce the number of military installations in the United States, the Secretary of Defense proposed to close the hospital, and the General Services Administration declared it to be "surplus property."

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) eventually assumed responsibility for disposing of portions of the property, and in August 1976, it conveyed a 77-acre tract to petitioner, the Valley Forge Christian College. The appraised value of the property at the time of conveyance was $577,500. This appraised value was discounted, however, by the Secretary's computation of a 100% public benefit allowance, which permitted petitioner to acquire the property without making any financial payment for it….

In September 1976, respondents Americans United Separation of Church and State, Inc. (Americans United), and four of its employees, learned of the conveyance through a news release. Two months later, they brought suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, later transferred to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, to challenge the conveyance on the ground that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. *** In its amended complaint, Americans United described it as nonprofit organization composed of 90,000 taxpayer members." The complaint asserted that each member "would be deprived of the fair and constitutional use of his (her) tax, dollar for constitutional purposes in violation of his (her) rights under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution." Respondents sought a declaration that the conveyance was null and void, and an order compelling petitioner to transfer the property back to the United States. ***

On petitioner's motion, the District Court granted summary judgment and dismissed the complaint. *** The court found that respondents lacked standing to sue as taxpayers under Flast v. Cohen *** (1968), and had "failed to allege that they have suffered any actual or concrete injury beyond a generalized grievance common to all taxpayers." ***

Respondents appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which reversed the judgment of the District Court by a divided Court. *** All members of the court agreed that respondents lacked standing as taxpayers to challenge the conveyance under Flast v. Cohen *** since that case extended standing to taxpayers qua taxpayers only to challenge congressional exercises of the power to tax and spend conferred by Art I., Sec. 8, of the Constitution, and this conveyance was authorized by legislation enacted under the authority of the Property Clause, Art. IV, Sec. 3, cl. 2. Notwithstanding this significant factual difference from Flast, the majority of the Court of Appeals found that respondents also had standing merely as "citizens," claiming injury in fact to their shared individuated right to a government that 'shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.' " *** In the majority's view, this "citizen standing" was sufficient to satisfy the "case or controversy" requirement of Art. III....

Because of the unusually broad and novel view of standing to litigate a substantive question in the federal courts adopted by the Court of Appeals, we granted certiorari, *** and we now reverse....

Article III of the Constitution limits the "judicial power` of the United States to the resolution of "cases" and "controversies." The constitutional power of federal courts cannot be defined, and indeed has no substance, without reference to the necessity to adjudge the legal rights of litigants in actual controversies." *** The requirements of Art. III are not satisfied merely because a party requests a court of the United States to declare its legal rights, and has couched that request for forms of relief historically associated with courts of law in terms that have a familiar ring to those trained in the legal process. The judicial power of the United States defined by Art. III is not an unconditioned authority to determine the constitutionality of legislative or executive acts. The power to declare the rights of individuals and to measure the authority of governments, this Court said 90 years ago, "is legitimate only in the last resort, and as a necessity in the determination of real, earnest and vital controversy." *** Otherwise, the power "is not judicial ... in the sense in which judicial power is granted by the Constitution to the courts of the United States." ***

As an incident to the elaboration of this bedrock requirement, this Court has always required that a litigant have "standing" to challenge the action sought to be adjudicated in the lawsuit....

... [A]t an irreducible minimum, Art. III requires the party who invokes the court's authority to "show that he personally has suffered some actual or threatened injury as a result of the putatively illegal conduct of the defendant;' *** and that the injury "fairly can be traced to the challenged action" and "is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision." *** In this manner does Art. III limit the federal judicial power "to those disputes which confine federal courts to a role consistent with a system of separated powers and which are traditionally thought to be capable of resolution through the judicial process." ***

We need not mince words when we say that the concept of "Art, III standing" has not been defined with complete consistency in all of the various cases decided by this Court which have discussed it, nor when we say that this very fact is probably proof that the concept cannot be reduced to a one-sentence or one-paragraph definition. But of one thing we may be sure: Those who do not possess Art. III standing may not litigate as suitors in the courts of the United States. Article III, which is every bit as important in its circumscription of the judicial power of the United States as in its granting of that power, is not merely a troublesome hurdle to be overcome if possible so as to reach the "merits" of a lawsuit which a party desires to have adjudicated; it is a part of the basic charter promulgated by the Framers of the Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787, a charter which created a general government, provided for the interaction between the government and the governments of the several States, and was later amended so as to either enhance or limits its authority with respect to both States and individuals....

Unlike the plaintiffs in Flast, respondents fail the first prong of the test for taxpayer standing. Their claim

is deficient in two respects. First, the source of their complaint is not a congressional action, but a decision by HEW to transfer a parcel of federal property. Flast limited taxpayer standing to challenges directed "only [at] exercises of congressional power." ***

Second, and perhaps redundantly, the property transfer about which respondents complain was not an exercise of authority conferred by the Taxing an Spending Clause of Art. 1, Sec. 8. The authorizing legislation, the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, was an evident exercise of Congress' power under the Property Clause, Art. I; Sec. cl. 2. Respondents do not dispute this conclusion, *** and it is decisive of any claim of taxpayer standing under the Flast precedent....

Respondents, therefore, are plainly without standing to sue as taxpayers.... It remains to be see whether respondents have alleged any other basis for standing to bring this suit....

... It is evident that respondents are firmly committed to the constitutional principle of separation of church and State, but standing is not measured by the intensity of the litigant's interest or the fervor of his advocacy.

... Their claim that the Government has violated the Establishment Clause does not provide a special license to roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing and to reveal their discoveries in federal court. The federal courts were simply not constituted as ombudsmen of the general welfare.

Were we to accept respondents' claim of standing in this case. There would be no principled basis for confining our exception to litigants relying on the Establishment Clause. Ultimately, that exception derives from the idea that the judicial power requires nothing more for its invocation than important issues and able litigants. The existence of injured parties who might not wish to bring suit becomes irrelevant. Because we are unwilling to countenance such a departure from the limits on judicial power contained in Art. III, the judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed....

Justice Brennan with whom Justice Marshall and Justice Blackmun join, dissenting.

The opinion of the Court is a stark example of this unfortunate trend of resolving cases at the threshold" while obscuring the nature of the underlying rights and interests at stake. The Court waxes eloquent on the blend of prudential and constitutional considerations that combine to create our misguided "standing" jurisprudence. But not one word is said about the Establishment Clause right that the plaintiff seeks to enforce. And despite its pat recitation of our standing decisions, the opinion utterly fails ... to explain why this case is unlike Flast v. Cohen, *** and is controlled instead by Frothingham v. Mellon *** (1923).

It may of course happen that a person believing himself injured in some obscure manner by government action will be held to have no legal right under the constitutional or statutory provision upon which he relies, and will not be permitted to complain of .the invasion of another person's "rights." It is quite another matter to employ the rhetoric of "standing" to deprive a person, whose interest is clearly protected by the law, of the opportunity to prove that his own rights have been violated. It is in precisely that dissembling enterprise that the Court indulges today....

In 1947, nine Justices of this Court recognized that the Establishment Clause does impose a very definite restriction on the power to tax. The Court held in Everson v. Board Of Education *** that the "'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this:"

It may be that Congress can tax for almost any reason, or for no reason at all. There is, so far as I have been able to discern, but one constitutionally imposed limit on that authority. Congress cannot use tax money to support a church, or to encourage religion. That is "the forbidden exaction." In absolute terms the history of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment makes this clear....

Blind to history, the Court attempts to distinguish: this case from Flast by wrenching snippets of language from our opinions, and by perfunctorily applying that language under color of the first prong of Flast’s two-part nexus test. The tortuous distinctions thus produced are specious, at best: at worst, they are pernicious to our constitutional heritage.

Plainly hostile to the Framer's understanding of the Establishment Clause, and Flast's enforcement of that understanding, the Court vents that hostility under the guise of standing, "to slam the courthouse door against the plaintiffs who [as the Framers intend intended] are entitled to full consideration of their [Establishment Clause] claims on the merits." *** Therefore I dissent.

Justice Stevens, dissenting....   * * *