Litigants must engineer standing and constitutional argument before courts will reach a contested right.

Evidence

Because a pregnant woman challenging a state abortion law would no longer be pregnant by the time her case reached the Supreme Court, the Court might avoid the issue on technical grounds, much as it had refused to hear an early challenge to Connecticut’s ban on the sale and use of contraceptives. … Advocates of abortion reform, therefore, faced two problems: First, they had to find an appropriate plaintiff to challenge a state abortion law. (As Box 10.1 shows, the discovery of “Jane Roe” occurred largely by chance.) Second, they had to develop persuasive arguments for the unconstitutionality of state abortion laws. This was complicated because the Constitution does not expressly deal with the right to terminate a pregnancy, and for more than a century, the states had laws on the books restricting abortion. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3089

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains justiciability/mootness as a practical gatekeeping constraint — why ‘the right case’ must be constructed, not found.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Right Plaintiff Problem’ — how constitutional rights are shaped by the accident of who happens to be litigable.