Yesterday, in a 6–3 decision in Trump v. Casa, the United States Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case involving an executive order that purports to eliminate birthright citizenship.
Confusingly, the Court’s decision wasn’t about the constitutionality of the birthright-citizenship order. Instead, the case proceeded on the assumption that the order was unconstitutional. The only question for the justices was about remedy: What kind of relief should federal courts provide when a plaintiff successfully challenges a government policy?
The lower courts had, in several birthright-citizenship cases across the country, entered what are known as “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. These injunctions prevented the executive order from applying to anyone, anywhere—even if they were not a party to the case. The Trump administration argued that nationwide injunctions were inappropriate and impermissible—injunctions should give relief only to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, no one else.
In a majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and put nationwide injunctions to the torch. That’s a big deal. Not only does it represent a major setback to the states and advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, it also amounts to a revolution in the remedial practices of the lower federal courts.
Nicholas Bagley: The birthright-citizenship case isn’t really about birthright citizenship
But it is not, as the dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have it, “an existential threat to the rule of law.” It won’t even mean the end of sweeping injunctions in the lower federal courts. To the contrary, the opinion suggests that relief tantamount to a nationwide injunction will still be available in many cases—including, in all likelihood, in the birthright-citizenship case itself.
Barrett’s opinion for the Court begins and ends with history. In 1789, the first Congress gave the federal courts jurisdiction over “all suits … in equity.” That conferral of authority allowed the courts to grant equitable remedies, one of which is the injunction. But that grant of power was not originally understood to give courts the power to enter injunctions extending beyond the parties to the suit—still less to cover the whole nation.
Instead, the courts hewed to a more traditional conception of judicial power. They sat to resolve disputes among parties, nothing more. That tradition held sway for more than 200 years. It only started to break down in the late 20th century as courts grew more comfortable with universal relief and became more concerned about executive overreach. By the time President Barack Obama took office, nationwide injunctions had become commonplace.
For Barrett, the novelty was enough on its own to condemn the practice. “The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” she wrote. “Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.” The federal courts thus lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Period. Full stop.
In my book, that’s a positive development. In 2020 testimony to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate, I argued that nationwide injunctions “enable opportunistic behavior by politically motivated litigants and judges, short-circuit a process in which multiple judges address hard legal questions, and inhibit the federal government’s ability to do its work. By inflating the judicial role, they also reinforce the sense that we ought to look to the courts for salvation from our political problems—a view that is difficult to square with basic principles of democratic self-governance.”
Although the Supreme Court divided along partisan lines, with the liberal justices dissenting, I don’t see this as a partisan issue. (The outrageous illegality and sheer ugliness of President Donald Trump’s executive order that lies underneath this fight may go some distance to explain why the three liberals dissented.) Nationwide injunctions are equal-opportunity offenders, thwarting Republican and Democratic initiatives alike. Today, it’s Trump’s birthright-citizenship order and USAID spending freezes. Yesterday it was mifepristone, the cancellation of student debt, and a COVID-vaccine mandate. Why should one federal judge—perhaps a very extreme judge, on either side—have the power to dictate government policy for the entire country? Good riddance.
Even as it ended nationwide injunctions, the Supreme Court left the door open for other forms of relief that are not nationwide injunctions—but that look a whole lot like them. That’s good news for opponents of the birthright-citizenship order.
First, Barrett confirmed the equitable principle that the federal courts can award “complete relief” to plaintiffs, even if that relief also incidentally protects third parties. She use
Content adapted by the team from the original source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/supreme-court-trump-injunctions/683354/?utm_source=yahoo-news
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