Indiana high court to determine associations’ legal power

The Indiana Supreme Court this fall will officially determine whether the state will continue to allow associations to sue on behalf of their members, a decision that some say could have significant implications for how organizations bring legal actions in the future.

The high court has scheduled an oral argument in Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, et al. v. Duke Energy Indiana LLC, et al. on Sept. 17 to finally resolve whether Indiana will embrace the federal doctrine of associational standing, which holds that an organization may intervene on behalf of one of its members, even if it itself has not suffered direct harm.

“This (decision) could impact businesses of all kinds of nature, whether it comes down to challenging a local ordinance that might impede a development that they want to build or grow or whatever the case may be,” said Kerwin Olson, the executive director of Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana.

“It would open the gates to any special interest group being able to assert a nebulous claim of damage to some mysterious member that they may or may not actually have,” said Andrew Wells, the deputy general counsel for Duke Energy of Indiana.

The question and overview

In early 2025, Duke Energy filed a petition with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission seeking a certificate of public convenience and necessity to replace two coal-powered units at the Cayuga Generating Station in Vermillion County with natural gas-based-versions.

The new units would use combined-cycle technology, which Duke says captures waste heat — which is normally lost from a natural gas turbine — and reuses it to power a steam turbine to extract more energy from the same fuel source.

“It’s reliable energy generation that meets the demands of Indiana’s modern electricity needs,” according to Duke’s website, adding that the new plant would cut carbon emission rates by more than 40% and significantly reduce the coal plant’s environmental temperature impact on the Wabash River.

But Citizens Action Coalition, along with other organizations, intervened.

Although Citizens Action has previously said it supports retiring the Cayuga coal units, it does not support replacing “one climate-wrecking fossil fuel with another.”

“Increasing investments in energy efficiency and replacing the Cayuga coal units with solar, wind, and battery storage would help save customers money and benefit our air, water, and climate,” according to Citizens Action Coalition’s website.

In October 2025, the IURC approved Duke’s request for the Cayuga project, finding that replacing the coal units with natural gas ones represents a cost-effective, long-term strategy and would be a significant environmental improvement.

Citizens Action Coalition then appealed the commission’s decision to the Indiana Court of Appeals, which had ruled just a couple of months prior in the coalition’s favor for a separate matter between Duke and the IURC.

In 2019, the IURC approved Duke’s request to raise utility rates in the state to recover costs it incurred between 2015 and 2018, after it brought its treatment and disposal of coal ash into federal compliance.

But the Indiana Supreme Court reversed the regulatory commission’s decision, noting that Indiana Code did not permit “retroactive ratemaking.”

In 2023, the Indiana General Assembly amended the Federal Mandate Statutes of the Indiana Code to allow the IURC to approve incurred costs associated with an energy company’s work to comply with federal standards, The Indiana Lawyer previously reported.

Not long after the change went into effect, Duke filed a new application with the IURC, seeking to recover about $62 million in costs it incurred between 2019 and 2022.

Citizens Action Coalition intervened, arguing that the request improperly sought to apply the amended Federal Mandate Statutes retroactively.

The Indiana Court of Appeals agreed and overturned the IURC’s decision.

In that case, among other points, Duke argued that Citizens Action Coalition had no standing to pursue the case.

Writing for the court, Appellate Judge Paul Mathias rejected Duke’s arguments, insisting that Indiana operates, and has consistently operated, under an associational standing framework, even though the Indiana Supreme Court has not officially weighed in on the topic.

“The Indiana Supreme Court has neither adopted nor rejected the doctrine of associational standing,” Mathias wrote in the Aug. 26, 2025, opinion. “But three different panels of our Court have expressly and unanimously adopted it.”

Duke petitioned to transfer the case to the Indiana Supreme Court, but because the justices were evenly divided on whether to grant or deny transfer, the transfer failed.

As the Cayuga plant case continues through the appeals process, Duke petitioned to transfer the matter to the Supreme Court to determine whether Citizens Action Coalition has standing to challenge the IURC’s decision.

In a split decision, the high court granted Duke’s transfer petition on April 14, 2026.

Chief Justice Loretta Rush and Justice Christopher Goff voted against the transfer because they did not believe the case presented an emergency “sufficient” to bypass the Court of Appeals’ review.

The doctrine

The doctrine of associational standing was established in the 1977 U.S. Supreme Court case Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Commission.

In 1972, North Carolina adopted a regulation requiring all apples shipped into the state in containers to display the U.S. Department of Agriculture grade.

Washington State apple growers argued that the law imposed an unreasonable burden on interstate commerce.

The high court held that the law did establish an unreasonable burden in violation of the Commerce Clause.

But the court also considered whether the Washington State Apple Advertising Commission had standing to bring its claims. The justices said it did.

In doing so, the court established a three-prong test to determine whether an association has standing to bring a claim. First, the association’s members would otherwise have standing to sue themselves. Second, the interests the association seeks to protect are pertinent to its purpose. And third, neither the claim asserted nor relief requested requires each member to participate individually.

Opponents of the doctrine have raised concerns that if Indiana formally embraces it, public interest groups could abuse that power and bring a swath of lawsuits.

“In practice, Hunt sets no floor for the number of members with individual standing … and no ceiling on the total membership of the plaintiff organization,” the Indiana Energy Association said in an amicus brief for Duke’s opposition to associational standing. “This not only permits super-organizations to blur the line between lobbying and litigation, but invites gamesmanship — including associations whose existence, or recruitment of members, is solely driven by litigation.”

Advocates of the doctrine do not predict a floodgate of special interest groups opening, though.

Hunt’s “requirements have prevented — and will continue to prevent — associational standing from opening the courthouse doors to any advocacy group who takes umbrage at governmental or private action,” stated the National Association of Wholesale Distributors’ amicus brief in support of Citizens Action Coalition.

Karen Harned, the executive director of the National Association of Wholesale Distributors’ Institute for Legal Reform & Public Policy, emphasized in an interview with The Lawyer that a majority of states have long accepted an associational standing posture

But the judiciary’s thinking has swayed in recent years.

Last summer, the Georgia Supreme Court took a strong stance against associational standing, concluding in two landmark election and zoning cases, Republican National Committee v. Eternal Vigilance Action and Bryan County v. Home Builders Association of Savannah, that the federal doctrine is “incompatible” with Georgia’s Constitution.

And last year, in Trump v. CASA, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court significantly limited federal courts’ ability to grant nationwide injunctions against the president’s executive orders. Although the court did not explicitly outlaw associational standing, it did indicate that groups must provide stronger reasoning when trying to bring claims on behalf of members, according to Sidley Austin LLP.

Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative member of the high court, scrutinized the recent use of associational standing in a concurring opinion for Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — a 2024 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that anti-abortion doctors did not have standing to challenge the FDA’s regulation of an abortion medication. Thomas said associational standing conflicts with Article III of the U.S. Constitution because it permits an association to assert its members’ injuries, rather than its own.

“Article III does not allow a plaintiff to seek to vindicate someone else’s injuries,” Thomas wrote. “It is difficult to see why that logic should not apply with equal force to an association as to any other plaintiff.”

Duke Energy has argued a similar point.

“Under Indiana law, only parties who suffer a direct, personal injury have standing to seek judicial review of an Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission decision, and neither the Citizens Action Coalition nor Vote Solar can demonstrate that,” Angeline Protogere, a Duke Energy of Indiana spokesperson, said in a written statement. “There’s significant precedent to support this, particularly the Indiana Supreme Court’s decision in Solarize Indiana v. Southern Indiana Gas & Electric where the court found that simply intervening in an Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission case does not create standing to seek judicial review of commission orders.”

But advocates for the doctrine hold that the whole point of an association is to speak for its members.

“That is why associations exist, is again, so that they can … surface their concerns, whether it’s legislative, regulatory, or in this case, litigation,” Harned said.

Other options?

Duke and other opponents of associational standing hold that associations’ members have other remedies to bring lawsuits aside from an associational standing framework — such as through class actions.

“That process provides a mechanism for which there can be some scrutiny placed on that group of customers for them to establish that yes, they do have an injury,” said Wells, the deputy general counsel of Duke Energy of Indiana.

But both Harned and Olson emphasized that class actions can be tedious. By following an associational standing position, they said, the courts can run more efficiently.

“There’s just a lot more procedural hoops,” Harned said. “You might miss people. People might not know about it, and with associations, as long as you’re a member, you’re in. … Class actions are meant for individual plaintiffs coming together with one issue. … If you already have an association, we’ve done that work, right? So why are we having to duplicate it through class actions?”

Harned also cautioned against class actions because they require naming individuals — which she said could lead to retribution.

“Now you’ve got a target list,” Harned said.

Harned said that when an individuals or organizations decide to sue an agency, even in a class action, they are essentially raising their hand to retaliation.

The Indiana Supreme Court has invited amicus curiae briefing on the associational standing question. More than a dozen organizations have joined in a brief supporting the doctrine.

Neither Citizens Action Coalition nor Duke has filed briefings at the time of writing.•