SCOTUS Limits Nationwide Injunctions: Read It For Yourself

Read the ruling and opinions for yourself here:

nationwide injunctions

From SCOTUSBlog:

In her 26-page opinion for the majority, Barrett stressed that courts would have the power to issue universal injunctions only if courts had provided similar remedies in early English and U.S. history. But there is no such history, Barrett concluded. Indeed, she noted, “universal injunctions were not a feature of federal-court litigation until sometime in the 20th century,” and they “remained rare until the turn of the 21st century.”

Barrett also pushed back against the suggestion that the district courts issued the universal injunctions in this case to provide the challengers with complete relief. Although the principle of complete relief is an important one, she recognized, it is a “narrower concept” than a universal injunction, and it focuses on the idea of providing “complete relief between the parties” in a particular case.

In this case, Barrett wrote, “prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship. Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete.”

The court did not decide whether the district courts’ injunctions should be narrower for the states challenging the executive order, and instead left it to the “lower courts [to] determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.” The states had argued, Barrett noted, that a universal injunction was necessary to give the states complete relief because of, for example, the likelihood that residents will move from one state to another or be born in a different state from their parents’ residence. Otherwise, the states contended, they would have to “track and verify the immigration status of the parents of every child, along with the birth State of every child for whom they provide certain federally funded benefits” that are contingent on U.S. citizenship.