The significant Supreme Court judgment on universal injunctions
Now the federal government does not have to comply with certain irksome court orders because the federal courts can no longer make them
This week I will be looking closely at what seems at a highly significant judgment of the United States Supreme Court. It is 119 pages and you can read it here.
At first glance it seems that while onlookers were (mis)directed into worrying about what happens if the Trump administration ignores court orders, the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, with more subtlety and artistry, has now robbed federal judges from making many of the most unwelcome court orders in first place.
If so, the problem of the federal government disobeying many irksome court orders in large part goes away, because federal judges cannot now even make the most effective court orders!
Such a judgment does not require just a hot-take, but a considered view. I will post more shortly.
In the meantime, please become a paying subscriber to this blog so that I can justify spending hours reading and considering such judgments so as to explain them to the public.
This case took me back to my student days, a very long time ago, when Lord Denning was Master of the Rolls.
From this US Supreme court decision my initial impression is that equity and a written constitution are uneasy bedfellows. This is the more so when the Supreme Court does not seem to have taken into account what I was told was the inherent continuing flexibility of the law of equity, but fossilised its powers as at the date of the declaration of independence.
In the absence of such flexibility, it may be that there is indeed no power to issue an injunction suspending the enforcement on a nationwide basis of even obviously illegal executive orders. This would though directly give rise to the extraordinary consequences laid out in the dissenting judgement of Justice Jackson. As he says:
21Cite as: 606 U. S. ____ (2025)
JACKSON, J., dissenting
… Make no mistake: Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected. This perverse burden shifting cannot co-exist with the rule of law. In essence, the Court has now shoved lower court judges out of the way in cases where executive action is challenged, and has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law. As a result, the Judiciary—the one institution that is solely responsible for ensuring our Republic endures as a Nation of laws—has put both our legal system, and our system of government, in grave jeopardy.
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