A Bad Decision on Nationwide Injunctions
Today’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. barring nationwide injunctions is a grave mistake. It risks allowing the executive to engage in large-scale violations of constitutional rights, potentially in perpetuity. Exactly how bad it is depends on the extent to which other remedies might fill the gap left by the elimination of nationwide injunctions.
Universal injunctions are judicial orders that bar illegal conduct by the defendants with respect to everyone who might be victimized by it, not just the specific parties to the case. The majority opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett concludes that the “equity” jurisdiction created by the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not include universal injunctions or anything sufficiently analogous to allow them:
The Judiciary Act of 1789 endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over “all suits . . . in equity,” §11, 1 Stat. 78, and still today, this statute “is what authorizes the federal
courts to issue equitable remedies,” S. Bray & E. Sherwin, Remedies 442 (4th ed. 2024). Though flexible, this equitable authority is not freewheeling. We have held that the
statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at our country’s inception. Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S. A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., 527 U. S. 308, 319 (1999)….We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently “analogous” to the relief issued ” ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of
the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act.’ ” Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 318–319….The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding.
Equity offered a mechanism for the Crown “to secure justice where it would not be secured by the ordinary and existing processes of law.” G. Adams, The Origin of English Equity, 16 Colum. L. Rev. 87, 91 (1916). This “judicial prerogative of the King” thus extended to “those causes which the ordinary judges were incapable of determining.” 1 J. Pomeroy, Equity Jurisprudence §31, p. 27 (1881). Eventually, the Crown instituted the “practice of delegating the cases” that “came before” the judicial prerogative “to the chancellor for his sole decision.” Id., §34, at 28. This “became the common mode of dealing with such controversies….Nor did founding-era courts of equity in the United States chart a different course…. If anything, the approach traditionally taken by federal courts cuts against the existence of such a sweeping remedy. Consider Scott v. Donald, where the plaintiff successfully challenged the constitutionality of a law on which state officials had relied to confiscate alcohol that the plaintiff kept for personal use. See 165 U. S. 107, 109 (1897) (statement of case); id., at 111–112 (opinion of the Court). Although the plaintiff sought an injunction barring enforcement of the law against both himself and anyone else “whose rights [were] infringed and threatened” by it, this Court permitted only a narrower decree between “the parties named a
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