Non-Submission of a Grant Application Is a Self-Inflicted Injury That Breaks Article III Causation for § 1981 Damages Standing

I. Introduction

Nathan Roberts v. Progressive Preferred Ins. Co. (6th Cir. Feb. 24, 2026) addresses when a plaintiff has Article III standing to seek damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 for alleged race discrimination in a private grant program. Progressive Preferred Insurance Company and Progressive Casualty Insurance Company (collectively “Progressive”) partnered with Circular Board Inc. to administer a “Driving Small Business Forward Fund” offering ten $25,000 grants for commercial vehicles, limited to “black-owned” small businesses.

Nathan Roberts (white) began an online application after receiving Progressive’s email invitation, then closed it without submitting upon learning of the race-based eligibility requirement. He brought a putative class action under § 1981 seeking damages and injunctive relief, alleging defendants refused to contract on non-discriminatory terms. The district court dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction (no standing). On appeal, Roberts challenged only dismissal of his damages claims and argued the district court’s judgment should be clarified as without prejudice.

Core issue: whether Roberts’s alleged injury—framed as inability to enter an “application-stage contract”—was fairly traceable to defendants’ conduct when Roberts never submitted the application.

II. Summary of the Opinion

The Sixth Circuit (Judge Mathis) affirmed dismissal for lack of standing. The court:

  • Treated defendants’ jurisdictional challenge as a facial attack, accepting pleaded facts as true but requiring plausible standing allegations.
  • Assumed (without deciding) that Roberts sufficiently alleged an injury in fact as to the supposed “application-stage contract.”
  • Held Roberts failed the causation/traceability element because his injury was self-inflicted: he could have formed the application-stage contract by submitting the application, but chose not to.
  • Distinguished FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, finding no “application or threatened application” of the race criterion to Roberts because he never applied.
  • Clarified that the district court’s jurisdictional dismissal operates without prejudice, even if the judgment was silent on that point.

Judge Boggs dissented, arguing Roberts alleged unequal-footing injury from a facial racial bar and should not be required to perform a futile act of applying.

III. Analysis

A. Precedents Cited (and How They Shaped the Decision)

1. Standing framework and pleading burden

  • Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife: supplied the canonical three-part standing test (injury, causation, redressability) and the requirement that injury be “actual or imminent.” The court drew directly from Lujan’s “fairly traceable” requirement to focus the case on causation.
  • Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez: reinforced that standing requires a concrete, personal stake, and that plaintiffs must “clearly allege” facts supporting standing at the pleading stage.
  • Clapper v. Amnesty Int'l USA: underwrote the court’s refusal to credit standing built on a plaintiff’s preemptive self-protective choices in response to hypothetical future harm. The majority invoked Clapper to characterize Roberts’s decision not to apply as an impermissible attempt to “manufacture standing.”
  • Dep't of Educ. v. Brown and Diamond Alt. Energy, LLC v. EPA: used for the proposition that traceability requires a causal connection and that the defendant likely caused the injury.

2. Facial vs. factual jurisdictional attacks

  • Carrier Corp. v. Outokumpu Oyj, United States v. Ritchie, Ass'n of Am. Physicians & Surgeons v. FDA, and Cartwright v. Garner: the panel relied on these to classify defendants’ standing challenge as facial and thus confine itself to the complaint’s allegations. This mattered because Roberts could not rely on later-developed facts to fill gaps in traceability.

3. “Self-inflicted injury” as a traceability breaker

  • Buchholz v. Meyer Njus Tanick, PA and Garland v. Orlans, PC: supplied the Sixth Circuit’s articulation that injuries “completely due to the plaintiff’s own fault” are not fairly traceable to defendants.
  • Savel v. MetroHealth Sys.: became the majority’s most analogous post-FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate precedent. Savel held employees who resigned before denial of their religious-exemption requests lacked standing—an “I stopped short” fact pattern the majority treated as parallel to Roberts’s aborted application.

4. Voluntary exposure to enforcement vs. no exposure at all

  • FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate: the majority used Cruz to draw a boundary: voluntary conduct does not negate causation when the government still threatens to enforce the challenged law. But here, defendants never applied or threatened to apply the race criterion to Roberts because he never submitted an application. Thus, the court read Cruz as inapplicable and reverted to Clapper’s anti-manufactured-standing principle.

5. Jurisdiction vs. merits (and the two-contract theory)

  • Inner City Contracting, LLC v. Charter Township of Northville, Gerber v. Herskovitz, and Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env't: these cases framed the court’s treatment of Circular Board’s argument that no “application-stage contract” exists as a merits argument not appropriate for jurisdictional dismissal unless “utterly frivolous.” The majority accepted (for standing analysis) that two contracts were plausibly alleged.
  • California v. Texas (Alito, J., dissenting) was cited for the “drive-by jurisdiction” caution: merits decisions silent on jurisdiction do not resolve standing. The majority invoked this to discount the dissent’s reliance on Runyon v. McCrary and International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States as standing support.
  • Merck v. Walmart, Inc.: used to justify evaluating standing through the plaintiff’s own pleaded legal theory of injury (here, inability to enter the first contract).

6. Form of judgment after jurisdictional dismissal

  • Stanley v. W. Mich. Univ., Nafziger v. McDermott Int'l, Inc., and Richmond v. Mosley: these supported the clarification that a dismissal for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction is without prejudice, notwithstanding a silent judgment. The court also anchored this in Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(b).

B. Legal Reasoning

  1. Identify the only live theory on appeal. Roberts abandoned any injury theory tied to the “grant-stage contract,” conceding no injury in fact there, so the case turned exclusively on the “application-stage contract.”
  2. Assume injury in fact; decide causation. The panel assumed Roberts plausibly alleged a concrete injury in being unable to enter the application-stage contract. But it held traceability failed because nothing defendants did prevented him from forming that contract: submission of the application was the mechanism of acceptance, and Roberts chose not to submit.
  3. Reject conclusory “denied because of race” allegations at the application stage. The court emphasized the absence of allegations that the application required race disclosure, certification, or that defendants discouraged white applicants from applying. It highlighted that Progressive’s email invited Roberts to “[a]pply to this fund today.”
  4. Use program “terms and conditions” to confirm timing of any discrimination. The court read the terms to mean the “application-stage contract” formed upon submission, with the discriminatory screening (if any) occurring only after submission during review—i.e., affecting only the later “grant-stage” relationship.
  5. Distinguish “voluntary injury” cases where enforcement is threatened. Unlike Cruz (challenged law still threatened enforcement), Roberts never entered the system where defendants could apply the challenged criterion to him; thus, his claimed injury flowed from his own choice rather than defendants’ application of a barrier.

C. Impact

The decision meaningfully tightens standing—at least within the Sixth Circuit—for damages-only challenges to allegedly discriminatory application processes when a plaintiff stops short of applying. Key likely effects:

  • Practical “apply-first” pressure. Plaintiffs challenging private race-based eligibility rules under § 1981 may need to submit an application (or otherwise create a record) showing the rule was applied or threatened to be applied to them, unless they can plead concrete facts establishing that the application itself imposed a race-based barrier.
  • Front-loading traceability facts. Complaints will likely focus on application mechanics (race attestation, required documentation, screening gates, “not eligible” messages), and on allegations that defendants would reject at submission (not merely at later selection).
  • Intra- and inter-circuit tension. The dissent’s approach aligns with a broader “unequal footing/futile gesture” conception associated with competitive-process cases; the majority’s approach may invite Supreme Court review if other circuits treat deterrence from applying to facial race bars as itself traceable injury.
  • Remedial consequences. Because the majority never reached redressability (having found no causation), plaintiffs may increasingly plead nominal damages plus facts of actual application to avoid early jurisdictional dismissals.

IV. Complex Concepts Simplified

42 U.S.C. § 1981
A federal statute prohibiting racial discrimination in making and enforcing contracts. A plaintiff must still satisfy Article III standing to sue in federal court.
Article III standing
The constitutional requirement that a plaintiff show (1) a real injury, (2) caused by the defendant, (3) that a court can remedy.
Causation / “fairly traceable”
The injury must be linked to what the defendant did. If the plaintiff’s own choice is the real reason the injury occurred, courts may find the chain too broken.
Self-inflicted injury
An injury the plaintiff brings upon himself (e.g., by declining to take an available step) that prevents attributing the harm to the defendant for standing purposes.
Facial vs. factual jurisdictional challenge
A facial challenge argues that even if the complaint’s facts are true, they do not establish jurisdiction (including standing). A factual challenge disputes the truth of those jurisdictional facts and permits evidence-weighing.
Dismissal without prejudice (jurisdiction)
When a court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction, it cannot decide the merits, so the dismissal generally does not bar refiling in a proper forum or with a proper jurisdictional showing.

V. Conclusion

Roberts establishes (or, at minimum, crystallizes) a Sixth Circuit rule of standing doctrine in the § 1981 grant-program context: when a plaintiff claims injury from inability to enter an application-stage contractual relationship but never submits the application, the injury is deemed self-inflicted and not fairly traceable to the program’s alleged discrimination—absent plausible allegations that the defendant applied or threatened to apply the race-based criterion at the application-formation stage itself.

The case also reiterates an important procedural point: jurisdictional dismissals are without prejudice, even when the judgment is silent.