Legal Docket: Court reins in universal injunctions

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 1st day of July 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket, and today we continue our analysis of Supreme Court opinions from the final week of the term.

Those final-week opinions often come with high drama—and few more so than Trump v CASA, the so-called birthright citizenship case. But headlines aside, it wasn’t really about birthright citizenship, even though it did stem from that. President Trump issued an executive order aimed at denying automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants.

REICHARD: The question presented was procedural, not constitutional. But it’s rather a consequential procedural question: Can a single federal district judge block a government policy nationwide, even for people who never sued over it?

That kind of court order is known as a “universal injunction.” And the Supreme Court in a 6 to 3 opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett said a single federal judge cannot do such a thing.

I called up Lael Weinberger, law professor at George Mason and a former law clerk to Justice Neil Gorsuch.

WEINBERGER: The bottom line of the majority opinion is that universal injunctions are not okay, and the court embraced a modest view of the judicial role.The majority opinion is an admirably clear explanation of the historical view of the judiciary's role, which is resolving disputes between individual parties, and it is a rebuke to those courts that have gone beyond that role and have been willing to offer what people have called universal relief, relief, or remedies for people who are not part of the case, and that historically, is just not what courts have done.

EICHER: Justice Clarence Thomas made that very point during oral argument in May:

THOMAS: We survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions.

Supporters of this decision see it as a return to first principles—Constitution 101. Judges are supposed to interpret the law and apply it to the parties before them. It’s not their job to write nationwide policy, that’s up to the other two branches.

WEINBERGER:This is a case that requires them to talk at a really fundamental level about what they think they are doing. And so the sharpest disagreement comes between Justice Barrett’s majority opinion and Justice Jackson’s dissent.

And that dissent was fiery. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the majority opinion “an existential threat to the rule of law.” She broke with tradition and skipped the collegial and customary: “I respectfully dissent.” Instead, she used the sign-off: “with deep disillusionment.”

REICHARD: Justice Barrett, with her five colleagues endorsing it, didn’t let the matter go unanswered. She zeroed in on the contradiction at the heart of Jackson’s argument—and delivered a pointed rejoinder: “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” It was a sharp line, and Lael Weinberger says it’s already doing what sharp lines tend to do: cut through the noise.

WEINBERGER: That is a strongly worded disagreement, and that line about an imperial executive doesn't justify an imperial judiciary. That is going to be a memorable encapsulation of this disagreement that I think is going to be understandable, not just to readers of this opinion, but also to a broader public, which is only going to hear this in in excerpt form, and already we see this exchange getting circulated all over social media and many people who are not going to click to read almost 120 pages of PDF opinions are going to see these lines.

I also called up Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute. He sees the Court’s ruling as a long-overdue course correction:

SHAPIRO: Finally, they've given it basically by saying that nationwide or universal injunctions generally go beyond federal court authority that they, courts have to tailor their rulings to the parties before them. Courts look at cases and controversies, and they don't just get kind of derivative authority to control parties who are not before them.

During oral argument, some justices offered a possible way to streamline disputes like this one: class actions. If challengers sue as a class, then relief could be broader, without violating judicial limits. Shapiro says it’ll have to be a work in progress:\

SHAPIRO: And Supreme Court does have nationwide or universal jurisdiction, but also we will see skirmishes in the lower court over class certification. If you have class actions that certainly binds much more broadly than just the specific individuals before you, as well as skirmishes over third party standing. That is, if states, as some states are involved in this birthright citizenship litigation, can they block policies just for that state? Would we end up with a patchwork whether for birthright citizenship or say, for rules of entry, for travel restrictions. Can there be a different rule if you're flying into, say, Atlanta International Airport versus JFK versus LAX? Those are going to be the battles going forward.

EICHER: That just might spur Congress into action. As US Solicitor General John Sauer said at oral argument, just five judicial districts issued 35 universal injunctions this year alone. Some say forum shopping is way out of hand.

Law professor Weinberger has seen how the court operates from the inside. He says the real story is how the justices manage to disagree, but then come back together:

WEINBERGER: …even as we read the really strident and strong disagreements that are expressed in this set of opinions, it's still the case that these justices, they've done this before, and then they go away for a summer, and then they come back and they're working together with the same group of nine people again and again and again. And this is one of the reasons that the Supreme Court, as an institution, has long had this practice of taking summers off, because there is this sense that the court is doing hard work under a lot of public scrutiny, under certain degrees of time pressure. This particular case happened under great time pressure because it went on a super expedited schedule and and yet, you have to find ways to to disagree, because these are justices with very different views of the law and of the Constitution and of how to understand its its words, and then they have to find ways to come together and work with these same people all over again. And that's not an easy thing to do.

REICHARD: I’d wondered why Justice Barrett was assigned to write the majority opinion. I asked Shapiro about that:

SHAPIRO: It could be that Chief Justice, that justice, Barrett, when she was a professor, was into civil procedure. So knows this area of law very well, with this respect to injunctions and the authority of district courts. It could be that he saw that she could keep all her colleagues in line, perhaps even more than the chief himself could. I don't know what there would be a lot of speculation about that, but it does play in nicely. It kind of ties a nice, nice bow in terms of the all of the criticism that she has gotten from the President's allies the last few months that between this and her writing in the Skrmetti case really, you know, takes a wind out of those criticisms.

EICHER: Bottom line: Going forward, the merits of each presidential executive order will still need to be tested in court. But it won’t get shot down because a single federal judge says so.

REICHARD: One more ruling to cover for today, Riley v Bondi.

This one’s also related to immigration it went 5-4 with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the liberals in dissent. It clarifies a key timing rule in immigration cases.

Pierre Riley overstayed his tourist visa in the 1990s. Years later, he was convicted on drug and firearms charges and landed in prison. He got an early release during the pandemic, and when he walked out, immigration agents were waiting to deport him to Jamaica.

EICHER: Riley asked not to be sent back, saying a drug lord there had threatened to kill him. But the Board of Immigration Appeals turned him down. He tried to appeal that, but the government said he was too late.

The question was when does the clock start running on time for appeal?

The majority cut him some slack, saying the rule isn’t so strict because it’s a “claim processing rule” and not a mandatory “jurisdictional rule.” It’s flexible.

REICHARD: Bottom line for Riley is he gets another shot at avoiding Jamaica and the government has to respond: no automatic dismissal over a timing technicality.

And that’s today’s Legal Docket. More tomorrow from my colleague Jenny Rough.

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