In Trump v. CASA, Inc., 2025 WL 1773631 (U.S. 2025), the U.S. Supreme Court ended the so-called “universal injunction” – here, an order issued by a single U.S. District Court to stop nationwide implementation of an Executive Order.
While this case arose from challenges to the president’s Executive Order ending “birthright citizenship,” this decision does not address that issue on the merits.
Rather, the Court addressed a very narrow question, namely: “whether the Government is likely to suffer irreparable harm from the District Courts’ entry of injunctions that likely exceed the authority conferred by the Judiciary Act [of 1789].”
Answer: yes.
From Justice Barrett’s majority opinion:
A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over “all suits … in equity,” § 11, 1 Stat. 78, and still today, this statute “is what authorizes the federal courts to issue equitable remedies,” S. Bray & E. Sherwin, Remedies 442 (4th ed. 2024). Though flexible, this equitable authority is not freewheeling. We have held that the statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at our country’s inception. Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S. A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., 527 U.S. 308, 319, 119 S.Ct. 1961, 144 L.Ed.2d 319 (1999); see also, e.g., Payne v. Hook, 7 Wall. 425, 430, 19 L.Ed. 260 (1869) (“The equity jurisdiction conferred on the Federal courts is the same that the High Court of Chancery in England possesses”). We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently “analogous” to the relief issued “ ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act.’ ” Grupo Mexicano, 527 U.S. at 318–319, 119 S.Ct. 1961 (quoting A. Dobie, Handbook of Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure 660 (1928)).
The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding.
The court concluded by noting that “federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch” but rather “resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them” and that “[w]hen a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”