## Facts

- Kansas enacted K.S.A. § 76-731a (House Bill 2145), deeming certain students Kansas residents for tuition if they attended a Kansas high school for at least three years, graduated (or earned a Kansas GED), and (if unlawfully present) filed an affidavit about seeking lawful status when eligible.
- Under the statute, undocumented Kansas high-school graduates paid in-state tuition at Kansas public universities.
- Plaintiffs were U.S.-citizen students (and some parents) charged nonresident tuition because they did not meet the Kansas-high-school criteria.
- Plaintiffs challenged the statute as (1) conflicting with 8 U.S.C. § 1623 and (2) violating equal protection by favoring certain undocumented students over nonresident U.S. citizens.
- The district court granted summary judgment to defendants, ruling plaintiffs lacked standing on equal protection and lacked a private cause of action to enforce 8 U.S.C. § 1623; plaintiffs appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether plaintiffs had Article III standing to pursue an Equal Protection challenge to Kansas’s tuition-classification statute.
2. Whether plaintiffs could seek to invalidate the statute as preempted by 8 U.S.C. § 1623 through (a) an implied private right of action under § 1623 or (b) an action under the Supremacy Clause against state officials.

## Decision

- The Tenth Circuit affirmed dismissal.
- Plaintiffs lacked Article III standing on the Equal Protection claim because the alleged injury was not fairly traceable to the challenged classification and was not redressable by striking down the statute.
- Plaintiffs lacked a cause of action to enforce 8 U.S.C. § 1623 because the statute contains no implied private right of action.
- The Supremacy Clause did not supply an independent cause of action to enforce § 1623 against state officials.

## Legal Principles

- Article III standing requires injury in fact, traceability, and redressability; a plaintiff must show that invalidating the challenged policy would likely remedy the plaintiff’s own concrete injury.
- A federal statute is privately enforceable only if Congress created an individual right and a mechanism for enforcement; statutes directed at regulating state conduct, without rights-creating language, generally do not imply a private right of action.
- The Supremacy Clause establishes federal priority over conflicting state law but does not itself create federal rights or a freestanding cause of action.

## Conclusion

The Tenth Circuit left Kansas’s in-state tuition statute in effect, holding that nonresident students failed to establish standing to challenge the law on equal protection grounds and could not enforce 8 U.S.C. § 1623 because neither the statute nor the Supremacy Clause provided a private cause of action.


Day v. Bond, 500 F.3d 1127 (10th Cir. 2007)