Rachel Bayefsky has posted Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones: Psychological Harm and Constitutional Standing (Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 81, Summer 2016 Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article offers a sustained treatment of psychological harm as cognizable injury-in-fact under constitutional standing analysis. The Supreme Court has held that Article III of the Constitution requires plaintiffs to show “injury-in-fact” in order to enter federal court. This Article takes up the question of whether psychological or emotional injury can and should count as injury-in-fact. The Supreme Court has not yet directly addressed this question, and lower federal courts have offered divergent perspectives. This Article proposes and applies a framework by which courts can directly accept psychological harm as injury-in-fact while also distinguishing between cognizable and non-cognizable psychological claims. In doing so, the Article and the accompanying Appendix offer a detailed analysis of the current treatment of psychological harm in constitutional standing doctrine across geographical and temporal boundaries.