The Supreme Court has ruled that federal courts lack the authority to issue “universal injunctions,” orders that block the enforcement of federal laws or executive actions against anyone in the country, not just the plaintiffs who brought the case.
The 6-3 decision, delivered by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, grants the Trump administration’s request to partially stay several lower court injunctions that had blocked President Trump’s Executive Order No. 14160 nationwide. The executive order sought to deny birthright citizenship to certain children born in the United States, a move that immediately drew legal challenges from individuals, advocacy organizations, and several states.
The Court’s majority held that universal, or “nationwide,” injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority granted to federal courts by Congress under the Judiciary Act of 1789. Instead, the Court ruled that injunctions should be limited to providing relief only to the plaintiffs with standing in each case, not to all potentially affected parties.
President Trump’s Executive Order No. 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” declared that certain children born in the U.S. , specifically those whose mothers were unlawfully present and whose fathers were neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents, would not be recognized as citizens. Plaintiffs argued that the order violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and federal law.
District courts in Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts issued universal injunctions blocking enforcement of the order nationwide.
The Court found that the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized only those equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at the time of the nation’s founding. Universal injunctions, the majority concluded, have no such historical pedigree and only emerged in the 20th century.
The opinion rejected analogies to historic “bills of peace” and class actions, noting that modern class actions are governed by strict procedural rules not met by universal injunctions. The Court also dismissed arguments that universal injunctions are necessary to provide “complete relief,” clarifying that courts can only provide complete relief to the actual plaintiffs, not to all similarly situated individuals.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, issued a forceful dissent. She warned that the decision “renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit,” and argued that the majority’s approach threatens the ability of courts to halt plainly unlawful government policies.
Key Arguments in the Dissent
1. The Threat to Constitutional Rights
Justice Sotomayor begins by situating the case in the context of President Trump’s Executive Order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship. She notes that every court to consider the order found it “patently unconstitutional,” yet the Supreme Court, instead of addressing the order’s legality, chose to focus on limiting the power of federal courts to issue broad injunctions.
“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 lawabiding 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.”
2. Defense of Universal Injunctions
Sotomayor strongly defends the traditional practice of issuing injunctions that protect nonparties in cases where a law or policy is facially unconstitutional. She argues that such remedies have deep roots in both equity and American legal history, and that the majority’s decision “disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to non-parties.”
She points out that universal injunctions have been a crucial tool for courts to prevent the government from enforcing unconstitutional laws against anyone, not just the plaintiffs. Without this tool, she argues, courts are powerless to stop the government from repeatedly applying the same unlawful policy to new individuals, requiring each to bring their own lawsuit to secure relief.
3. Practical Consequences and Judicial Abdication
Justice Sotomayor warns that the majority’s ruling will have severe practical consequences, especially for vulnerable populations. She notes that requiring individuals to file separate lawsuits to challenge the same unlawful policy is inefficient, costly, and may leave many without effective protection of their rights. She also cautions that the decision incentivizes the government to continue enforcing unlawful policies against nonparties, knowing that courts cannot issue broad injunctions to stop them.
4. The Judiciary’s Role as a Check on Unlawful Government Action
The dissent talks the importance of the judiciary as a check on executive overreach. By stripping courts of the power to issue universal injunctions, the majority, in Sotomayor’s view, abdicates this essential role and leaves constitutional rights at the mercy of executive discretion.
“By needlessly granting the Government’s emergency application to prohibit universal injunctions, the Court has cleared a path for the Executive to choose law-free action at this perilous moment for our Constitution—right when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” Justice Jackson wrote. “I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more. Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway. But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise. At the very least, I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government’s self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot. The majority forgets (or ignores) that “[w]ith all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.”
