Nationwide injunction

Based on Wikipedia: Nationwide injunction

When a single federal judge in Texas or Hawaii can block a president's signature policy across all fifty states with the stroke of a pen, something remarkable is happening in American law. This power—the nationwide injunction—has become one of the most controversial tools in modern constitutional warfare, and understanding it helps explain why every recent administration has found itself repeatedly stopped cold by courts far from Washington.

What Exactly Is a Nationwide Injunction?

An injunction is a court order that tells someone to stop doing something. When you sue your neighbor to stop them from building a fence on your property, and the judge agrees, that's an injunction. It's directed at a specific person and protects a specific plaintiff.

A nationwide injunction is something far more expansive. When a federal judge issues one, they're not just protecting the person who filed the lawsuit. They're ordering the federal government to stop enforcing a law or policy against everyone in the country—even people who never asked for the court's help, even people who might actually want the policy enforced.

Think about what this means in practice. A single district court judge, appointed for life and answerable to no electorate, can effectively veto a decision made by the President of the United States, confirmed by executive agencies staffed with thousands of experts, and potentially supported by Congress. And this veto applies not just in that judge's courtroom, not just in their district, not just in their circuit—but everywhere.

A Power That Didn't Exist for Most of American History

Here's the surprising part: this power is new. Really new.

For roughly the first 175 years of the American republic, courts simply didn't do this. The traditional understanding was straightforward: if you sue someone, the court can protect you from them. It cannot protect the entire world from them. A court's power extends to the parties before it, not to strangers who never walked through the courthouse doors.

This wasn't an oversight or a lack of imagination. English courts of equity, which American courts inherited much of their injunctive power from, had developed a narrow exception called a "bill of peace." If a landlord was mistreating many tenants in the same way, and several of those tenants sued together, the court might issue an order protecting even the tenants who hadn't joined the lawsuit. But this only worked for small, identifiable groups with genuinely common claims—not for every person in the nation.

The Supreme Court explicitly blessed this limited exception in 1923, comparing the relationship between citizens of a small municipality and their local government to the relationship between shareholders and a corporation. That analogy only stretches so far. The citizens of a single town are a bounded, knowable group. The citizens of the entire United States are something else entirely.

The New Deal Test Case

The absence of nationwide injunctions becomes especially striking when you look at the New Deal era. During the 1930s, federal courts struck down one major piece of Roosevelt's economic legislation after another. The National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, provisions of the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act—all fell before judicial review.

Yet the courts didn't issue nationwide injunctions against these laws. Instead, each business or individual who wanted relief from an unconstitutional statute had to file their own lawsuit. For some provisions, this meant over a thousand separate injunctions, each protecting one plaintiff at a time.

This seems inefficient from a modern perspective. If a law is unconstitutional, isn't it unconstitutional for everyone? Why make hundreds of people file separate lawsuits to establish the same point?

But consider what this system preserved. Different courts could reach different conclusions. The government could continue enforcing the law in places where it hadn't been challenged, buying time to appeal or even to persuade Congress to revise the statute. The legal question could percolate through the court system, with multiple judges weighing in before the Supreme Court had to decide. No single district judge could unilaterally shut down a major federal program.

The 1960s: Something Changes

Justice Clarence Thomas has traced the emergence of nationwide injunctions to the 1960s, and legal scholars generally agree. The first clear example may have come in 1963, when a federal appeals court in Washington conditionally ordered the Secretary of Transportation to stop applying a wage regulation to anyone, not just the companies that had sued.

Why did this change happen? Several explanations compete for attention.

One is simply that it became easier to sue the federal government. Before 1976, the doctrine of sovereign immunity—the ancient principle that the king cannot be sued without his consent—made it difficult to bring many claims against federal officials. When Congress waived this immunity more broadly, litigation against the government became more practical.

Another factor was venue rules. For a long time, if you wanted to sue a cabinet secretary, you generally had to do it in Washington. This concentrated cases before judges who saw the federal government regularly and perhaps had a more nuanced sense of when to intervene. As venue rules loosened, litigants could choose friendlier forums.

But perhaps the most important factor was simply that someone tried it, and it worked. In law, as in many fields, innovation often comes not from careful theoretical reasoning but from a creative litigator pushing boundaries—and courts going along.

The Numbers Tell a Story

For decades after 1963, nationwide injunctions remained "exceedingly rare," according to the Department of Justice. Courts issued perhaps one or two per year against the Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations.

Then the numbers started climbing.

The Obama administration faced 19 or 20 nationwide injunctions over eight years. The first Trump administration faced 55 in just four years—including 20 in its first year alone. The Biden administration saw 14 in its first three years. And as of April 2025, the second Trump administration has already faced at least 17.

This isn't just more litigation. It's a transformation in how litigation works. When judges across the country can each freeze a major federal policy, and when lawyers can choose where to file their challenges, the result is a kind of judicial lottery. Find the right judge in the right district, and you might stop a presidency in its tracks.

Forum Shopping and the Rise of Strategic Litigation

The technical term is "forum shopping," but that phrase doesn't capture the strategic sophistication involved. When a group wants to challenge a Democratic administration's policy, they often file in the Northern District of Texas or the Western District of Texas. When challenging a Republican administration, the Northern District of California or the District of Hawaii become popular choices.

Why? Because judges in these districts have track records. The Northern District of Texas includes judges appointed by Republican presidents who have shown willingness to block Democratic initiatives. The Northern District of California includes judges appointed by Democratic presidents who have done the same to Republican policies.

This creates a peculiar dynamic. A district judge in Amarillo, Texas, presiding over a jurisdiction of about half a million people, can effectively override decisions made for a nation of 330 million. A judge in Honolulu can do the same. The location of a lawsuit matters more than it should in a system supposedly governed by uniform federal law.

The Great Cases

Some nationwide injunctions have reshaped American policy in profound ways.

In 2015, Judge Andrew Hanen in the Southern District of Texas blocked the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, or DAPA, program. This Obama administration policy would have protected approximately four million undocumented immigrants from deportation. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Hanen's injunction, and the program never took effect.

In 2016, Judge Reed O'Connor in the Northern District of Texas blocked Obama administration guidance on transgender bathroom access in schools. The administration argued that Title IX—the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education—required schools to let transgender students use facilities matching their gender identity. O'Connor disagreed and issued a nationwide injunction. When the government asked him to narrow his order to only the states that had sued, he declined.

The pattern continued under Trump. Within three weeks of his inauguration, Judge James Robart in Seattle blocked the administration's first travel ban. A month later, Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii blocked its replacement. Judge William Orrick in San Francisco blocked restrictions on funding to sanctuary cities. Multiple judges blocked the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which protected young people brought to the country illegally as children.

Under Biden, the tool remained in regular use. And under the second Trump administration, judges have repeatedly blocked efforts to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship clause.

The Case Against Nationwide Injunctions

Professor Samuel Bray of Notre Dame Law School has emerged as the leading academic critic of this practice. His argument is grounded in history and legal principle.

The Constitution, Bray argues, gives federal courts power to decide "cases" and "controversies." A case involves specific parties with specific injuries. When a court orders relief that protects people who aren't parties to the case, it has exceeded its constitutional authority. Those people haven't presented their arguments. They haven't submitted evidence. They may not even want the protection being offered on their behalf.

Bray traces the historical practice carefully. At common law, courts of equity issued injunctions that protected plaintiffs against defendants. They did not issue injunctions that protected the entire world against defendants. The bill of peace was a narrow exception for small, cohesive groups with genuinely common claims—not a general license for courts to regulate government conduct universally.

Justice Thomas has endorsed this view in several writings, describing himself as "skeptical that district courts have the authority to enter universal injunctions." No persuasive defense, he has written, has been offered for the practice.

Justice Neil Gorsuch has raised similar concerns, warning that such injunctions "raise serious questions about the scope of courts' equitable powers under Article III." A court's job is to redress injuries sustained by particular plaintiffs in particular lawsuits—not to manage federal policy for the benefit of strangers.

The Practical Problems

Beyond the constitutional questions, nationwide injunctions create practical difficulties that ripple through the legal system.

First, they encourage the forum shopping discussed earlier. Sophisticated litigants know which judges are likely to be sympathetic and can file strategically. This transforms the federal judiciary from a system where location shouldn't matter into one where location is everything.

Second, they short-circuit the normal process by which legal questions develop. Traditionally, different courts might reach different conclusions about a statute's constitutionality. This disagreement, called a "circuit split," often prompts the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the question. But if a single district judge issues a nationwide injunction, the question may be frozen before other courts can weigh in. The first decision becomes, functionally, the last.

Third, they can conflict with each other. What happens when a judge in Texas issues a nationwide injunction requiring the government to do something, and a judge in California issues a nationwide injunction forbidding the exact same thing? The government is placed in an impossible position, certain to violate one order no matter what it does.

Finally, they may discourage courts from engaging carefully with the merits. When a preliminary injunction—issued early in litigation before full evidence is gathered—can block a policy nationwide, judges face enormous pressure at the very moment they have the least information. The temptation to issue sweeping orders based on incomplete understanding is substantial.

The Case for Nationwide Injunctions

Defenders of the practice offer several responses.

Some argue that the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal statute governing challenges to agency action, actually requires courts to "set aside" unlawful agency rules entirely—not just to exempt individual plaintiffs. If an agency regulation exceeds the agency's statutory authority or violates the Constitution, the regulation is invalid as a matter of law. It doesn't become valid again when applied to different people.

Others point to the immigration context specifically. The Constitution's Naturalization Clause gives Congress power over immigration policy, and courts have interpreted this to require nationwide uniformity. If immigration rules can vary from district to district based on where lawsuits happen to be filed, the constitutional scheme breaks down.

A different argument focuses on complete relief. In some cases, the only way to fully protect a plaintiff is to issue a broader injunction. Consider an organization that represents immigrants across the country. Even if only that organization formally sues, protecting its interests might require stopping a policy's enforcement against the immigrants it represents nationwide.

Perhaps most practically, defenders note that without nationwide injunctions, the burden of challenging unconstitutional policies would fall most heavily on those least able to bear it. Wealthy individuals and well-funded organizations can file their own lawsuits. The poor, the marginalized, and the unrepresented cannot. Universal injunctions let the vindication of one person's rights benefit everyone similarly situated.

The Constraining Effect

One concern rarely discussed is what nationwide injunctions do to subsequent litigation. Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York has pointed out that once one court issues a nationwide injunction, judges in other courts face a difficult choice. Even if they would have ruled differently on the merits, they cannot effectively do so—their ruling would conflict with a binding injunction from a sister court.

This freezes legal development in place. The first judge to rule gets to set the terms, even if that judge's reasoning is flawed or their district is unrepresentative of national concerns. Courts that might have offered different perspectives are silenced not by superior legal authority but by the accident of timing.

The Supreme Court Weighs In

For years, the Supreme Court declined to resolve whether nationwide injunctions are permissible at all. Individual justices criticized the practice in separate writings, but the Court as an institution stayed its hand.

That changed on June 27, 2025. In Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts lack authority to issue universal injunctions. The Court's reasoning was grounded in history and statutory interpretation: Congress created federal courts' equity jurisdiction through the Judiciary Act of 1789, and at that time, nothing like modern nationwide injunctions existed. Since Congress granted no such power and courts did not exercise it traditionally, the practice exceeded judicial authority.

The decision limits but does not entirely eliminate broad injunctive relief. Courts may still issue injunctions protecting everyone before them—including, in class actions, potentially millions of people. They may still vacate agency rules entirely under the Administrative Procedure Act, though scholars debate whether that amounts to the same thing. And they may still issue injunctions with broad territorial scope when that's necessary to protect the plaintiffs actually before the court.

What courts may not do, after CASA, is issue orders explicitly directing the federal government how to behave toward people who never participated in the lawsuit at all.

What This Means Going Forward

The end of nationwide injunctions—or at least their formal prohibition—will change American constitutional litigation in ways that remain uncertain.

Challengers to federal policy will need to work harder to vindicate their claims on behalf of others. Class action procedures, where a named plaintiff explicitly represents a larger group, may become more important. Organizations with broad membership will have incentives to ensure their members are spread across the country, giving them standing to seek relief everywhere.

The government, for its part, will have more ability to continue enforcing contested policies in parts of the country where they haven't been challenged. A successful lawsuit in the Northern District of California might protect Californians, but residents of states whose attorneys general support the federal policy may find themselves without recourse unless they file their own suits.

Some see this as a return to proper order. Courts deciding cases for the parties before them, as courts have done for centuries. Others see it as a step backward for equal justice. The same law applying differently depending on where you happen to live, with the burden of litigation falling most heavily on those least able to shoulder it.

What seems clear is that the brief era of the nationwide injunction—roughly sixty years in the sweep of American legal history—has fundamentally reshaped expectations about what courts can do. Even if the formal practice ends, the memory of it will influence how lawyers think about federal litigation, how judges conceive their role, and how advocates organize their campaigns for legal change.

The story of the nationwide injunction is ultimately a story about the Constitution's most fundamental tensions: between federal uniformity and local variation, between judicial power and democratic governance, between protecting individual rights and preserving institutional legitimacy. These tensions do not resolve themselves. They are managed, contested, and negotiated anew in each generation. The nationwide injunction was one chapter in that ongoing negotiation. Its conclusion opens the next.