Annoying robocalls, the sharing of personal health information, polluted water, the misleading marketing of credit rates by financial institutions. These are issues nearly every American faces.

To its credit, Congress has responded to (some of) these issues with (occasionally) robust consumer protection legislation. For example, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act—aimed at curbing robocalls—authorizes the recovery of $1,500 for a willing or knowing violation of the Act. Someone obtains your credit report under false pretenses? Consumers can recover $1,000 in statutory damages or actual damages, whichever is greater, thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

To increase enforcement of these statutes, Congress often granted “concurrent enforcement authority”—that is, enforcement actions can be brought by the federal government, private plaintiffs, and state governments. Concurrent enforcement authority serves the interests of consumers. Consumers with significant financial injuries can likely find individual private representation on contingency. Consumers with smaller financial injuries can join together in class actions to make private enforcement financially feasible. The federal government can take cases that private attorneys will not or cannot take, and state governments can fill in the rest.

But these federal consumer laws currently go under-enforced. Part I of this note describes how two decades of Supreme Court decisions have made it more difficult and more expensive for private plaintiffs to vindicate their rights as consumers. The federal government, limited in willpower and resources, hasn’t stepped up.

Part II of this note suggests that State Attorneys General (“SAGs”) are uniquely well-poised to become leading protectors of American consumers. They have concurrent enforcement authority, broad investigatory powers under state law, and the ability to scale-up enforcement proceedings by hiring third-party counsel.

Part III of this note highlights how SAGs, bringing enforcement actions in federal court under these federal laws, will have to justify Article III standing through the parens patriae standing doctrine. In parens patriae suits, the SAGs have not themselves directly suffered an injury in fact. Instead, SAGs utilize the cause of action—granted to them by the federal consumer laws—to bring litigation on behalf of aggrieved consumers as “parent[s] of the state.”

Prior to Spokeo and TransUnion, courts assumed that parens patriae standing was coterminous with this cause of action. However, post-TransUnion, defendants in SAG-led enforcement actions are asserting in their motions to dismiss that SAGs must establish parens patriae standing independently of the statutory causes of action. This note aims to analyze core contested questions in parens patriae litigation in a post-TransUnion world, hoping to (1) identify the doctrinal requirements and open questions of parens patriae standing and (2) act as a resource for enterprising SAGs looking for creative ways to protect their home states’ consumers through enforcing federal law.

Part III outlines the two types of parens patriae standing, describing the doctrinal requirements of what this note calls “statutory” and “common law” parens patriae standing. Part III then identifies open questions and attempts to resolve splits among the federal circuits, suggesting that SAGs should be able to recover significant statutory damages awards per federal consumer protection laws through parens patriae litigation.

Part IV identifies the federal consumer laws with concurrent enforcement authority for SAGs, noting which laws restrict enforcement actions to federal court and which laws authorize SAGs to bring suit in state court—authorization which enables SAGs to sidestep the Article III parens patriae analysis entirely.