The Pacific Justice Institute (not to be confused with the Pacific Legal Foundation, where Sandefur works) has put out a press release about the 9th circuit court of appeals hearing their appeal of Caldwell v Caldwell. No, this is not Larry Caldwell suing himself (though given his penchant for filing frivolous lawsuits, such a suit is probably inevitable), it's his wife Jeanne suing Berkeley and Roy Caldwell over the Understanding Evolution website.

Their complaint is that the site mentions that not all Christian denominations reject evolution and it has a link to position statements by various denominations endorsing evolution. They say this is an endorsement of those positions, but that is quite absurd as it is merely a description of them. Nowhere does the site say those positions are correct and the opposing positions are wrong, it merely points out that some Christian denominations accept evolution.

Oral arguments in the appeal are this week but they've got approximately zero chance of winning the appeal. The district court dismissed the case based on lack of standing:

The website, which the mother alleged was made possible through a federal grant provided by the NSF in the amount of $ 523,261, was part of a larger website maintained by the University's Museum of Paleontology. Its purpose was to educate teachers and the general public about the science and history of evolutionary biology. The court held that the mother had failed to allege federal taxpayer standing, and her complaint could not be supported on that ground since: (1) she nowhere alleged any type of qualifying legislative enactment or congressional act, only the NSF grant which was independent of any congressional action, and which had no direct link to the general appropriations that Congress made to the various NSF directorates; and (2) the nexus between her taxpayer status and the nature of the alleged constitutional infringement was missing. Furthermore, her allegations constituted no more than the generalized grievances of a mere interested bystander; therefore, standing was lacking as her allegations were insufficient to confer injury in fact.

Frankly, I don't like that. As I've written many times, our courts have created a ridiculous labyrinth of taxpayer standing doctrine out of thin air and it should be pretty much done away with completely. But since this ruling two years ago, the Supreme Court has actually made taxpayer standing even more difficult to establish, so she's got zero chance of winning this one. The district court ruling will be upheld.

I would prefer that the court had granted standing and rejected their legal argument as absurd.