Bredhoff Petitions U.S. Supreme Court To Hear Case Testing the Limits of Article III Standing for Local Taxpayers
January 27, 2026
Bredhoff recently filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in Anoka Hennepin Education Minnesota v. Huizenga (No. 25-888), asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether a municipal taxpayer may challenge a municipal policy in federal court based only on her status as a taxpayer and, if so, what she must prove in order to do so.
The case involves claims by municipal taxpayers seeking to invalidate a provision of the collective-bargaining agreement between Anoka Hennepin Education Minnesota and Minnesota’s Independent School District No. 11. The CBA provision, which permits modest amounts of release time for district teachers to conduct union business so long as the union pays any substitute-teacher costs, is fully self-financing and thus costs the municipality nothing. As a result, the taxpayer plaintiffs could not show a pocketbook injury to the school district or trace any injury to their own municipal tax dollars. Consistent with the weight of authority from the Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, the district court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing.
The Eighth Circuit reversed in a split decision, holding that taxpayers could challenge a municipal policy based only on their contention that it involved the “misuse” of municipal funds—even though any expenditure is fully reimbursed by the union. To reach that result, the Eighth Circuit took sides on two separate circuit splits, departing from the decisions of at least six other circuits, including a 2020 decision by a unanimous panel of the Seventh Circuit written by then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
As we explain in our petition on behalf of Anoka Hennepin Education Minnesota, the Eighth Circuit’s rule rests solely on a passage from the Supreme Court’s century-old decision in Frothingham v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447 (1923), analogizing municipal taxpayers to corporate shareholders in an effort to distinguish an earlier case, Crampton v. Zabriskie, 101 U.S. 601 (1879). But the Eighth Circuit greatly overread Frothingham—a case that, in all events, cannot be reconciled with the intervening century of Supreme Court precedents clarifying the scope of Article III standing.
Bredhoff has litigated the case on behalf of the union since its inception in 2020.