Nationwide injunctions likely exceed federal courts’ authority, Supreme Court says
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the Trump administration Friday when it ruled 6-3 that nationwide injunctions likely exceed the authority of federal courts.
Only the plaintiffs should be awarded relief by a district court injunction, the Supreme Court said. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion.
The high court’s three liberal justices argued in dissents that eliminating nationwide injunctions undermines constitutional guarantees and the rule of law.
But Barrett said courts can’t issue nationwide injunctions without authority to do so.
“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the executive branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Barrett wrote. “When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
The Judiciary Act of 1789 granted federal courts authority over all lawsuits “in equity,” but “this equitable authority is not freewheeling,” Barrett said. Nationwide injunctions are not authorized by the law because there was no historical tradition of granting relief beyond the parties.
“Of importance here, suits in equity were brought by and against individual parties,” Barrett said.
Nationwide injunctions, also known as universal injunctions, are instead analogous to relief in class action suits, which are governed by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Barrett said.
“By forging a shortcut to relief that benefits parties and nonparties alike, universal injunctions circumvent Rule 23’s procedural protections,” Barrett said. “Why bother with a Rule 23 class action when the quick fix of a universal injunction is on the table?”
U.S. solicitors general—on multiple occasions and across administrations—have asked the Supreme Court to consider the propriety of the “expansive remedy” of universal injunctions, Barrett wrote.
“It is easy to see why. By the end of the Biden administration, we had reached ‘a state of affairs where almost every major presidential act [was] immediately frozen by a federal district court,’” Barrett wrote, citing a law review article. “The trend has continued: During the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, district courts issued approximately 25 universal injunctions.”
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to restrict injunctions, so that they applied only to the individual plaintiffs and “identified members of the organizational plaintiffs or states” in challenges to President Donald Trump’s order on birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court did not resolve the constitutionality of Trump’s order in its opinion. Nor did it decide how its opinion applies when states are plaintiffs.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates,” Sotomayor wrote. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent.”
Jackson wrote a separate dissent.
“The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” she wrote.
Trump’s order bans birthright citizenship when a mother is in the country illegally or temporarily and when a father was not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident at the time. Litigants claimed that the order violates the citizenship clause of 14th Amendment, which reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
The case, Trump v. CASA, was consolidated with two related cases.
Hat tip to SCOTUSblog, which had early coverage of the decision.
See also:
Chemerinsky: SCOTUS takes on multiple challenges to executive orders from Trump administration
Politically charged ‘shadow docket’ cases taking over Supreme Court during its busiest time
Trump says he will sign order ending birthright citizenship for some; would it be constitutional?
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