If you're not a U.S. Supreme Court junkie, you wouldn't know that the single topic that most exercised the justices in the decisions issued in late June was the arcane law of standing. This is the requirement that every case before the court pose two parties against each other, arguing the opposite sides of the case at hand.
Adversarial standing isn't generally the stuff of headlines. But gradual revelations of a large body of secret law made by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court demonstrate what happens when it falls by the wayside: The courts lose the appearance of impartiality — and sometimes the reality of it, too. In our system, courts that only listen to the government shouldn't really be considered courts at all.
The origins of standing don't lie in the text of the U.S. Constitution, but in the early Supreme Court's understanding of what made a court truly judicial. Article III of the U.S. Constitution confers the judicial power in "cases or controversies" — and the court interpreted these words to mean it lacked power when there was no real fight between adverse parties. Famously, when George Washington asked the court to help him decide on the constitutionality of a law Congress had presented to him for his signature, the court refused.